Professionalism and educational change in the Chinese school context

Members
Dr HO Chun Sing Maxwell	Maxwell Ho’s research interest includes teacher entrepreneurship , professional development, school change, and business education. He focuses on the following contemporary issues: Business education development – As a former business subject teacher, he devotes himself in promoting business education in primary and secondary schools (e.g., student literacy in entrepreneurship, personal finance, management, and accounting, etc.) Teacher entrepreneurship and professional development – Support  for teachers is limited in the education sector. He is interested in developing a network for facilitating teacher entrepreneurship and professional development in this domain. School innovation – School need to innovate to realise continuous improvement. He is interested in investigating how schools empower entrepreneurial teachers to realise change (e.g., e-learning, STEM, etc.)
Dr KO Yue On James	James has extensive training and education in linguistics, psychology and education, with diplomas and degrees from Canada, Hong Kong, and the U.K.   Prior to his doctoral study, James was an EFL teacher for about 20 years and a department head of a secondary school for 10 years.   He led several innovative projects in student discipline, counselling and guidance, social and emotional learning, curriculum development, teacher professional development, and organisational learning, receiving external funds from the Educational Department, ICAC and Citibank.   His research experience and interests are diverse. He has worked in various large scale research projects funded by the RGC in Hong Kong and by the ESRC and DSCF in the UK. He collaborates with local academics and overseas researchers of University of Oxford, University of Cyprus, University of Groningen, University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, and University of Helsinki in local and international research projects.   He does mixed-method research and tries to keep his mind open to ideas of both qualitative and quantitative camps. He is a Research Fellow of the Institute's Joseph Lau Luen Hung Charitable Trust Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change (APCLC). More details
Dr LEE Hui Lin Daphnee	Daphnee Lee is on a research journey to understand how professional identities are shaped by change, and how professionals develop strategies to empower themselves in the face of change.   Recently, Daphnee is focused on how teacher professionals collaborate to develop strategies to improve teaching and learning through professional learning communities. She is interested in examining how collaborative relationships in teacher professional development within the social context of Chinese school systems. A fundamental question that Daphnee is currently grappling with is: Can teacher leadership emerge from contexts that share the common foundations of centralised education policies and alignment with authoritative opinion leaders? Specifically, can collaborative relationships empower the everyday classroom teacher to initiate change, if s/he possesses the conviction to improve the learning of students, but does not have the authority of formally appointed leaders? More details