The Context of Professional Development

In the initial stage of design, we should be aware of the context that could affect the implementation of professional development. In setting the goals for professional development, first of all, the development of organization culture should be considered. Besides that, teacher collaboration is another important issue. In order to explain how these contextual issues in professional development, it is necessary to discuss the important contextual issues. In fact, these issues are inter-related, namely, community of practice, continuous professional development, learning organization, and fostering a professional culture and school change.

Community of Practice

Culture and professional development are inter-related because professional development activities contribute to a culture of collegiality, critical inquiry, and continuous improvement; whereas the school culture stimulates ongoing professional development (Hord and Boyd, 1995).

A community of practice (CoP) is a special type of informal network that emerges from a desire to work more effectively or to understand work more deeply among members of a particular specialty or work group. At the simplest level, CoPs are small groups of people who've worked together over a period of time and through extensive communication have developed a common sense of purpose and a desire to share work-related knowledge and experience (Sharp, 1997).

Regarding the shortcomings of the traditional approach of professional development, we suggest that the ideas of community of practice and learning organization should be taken into consideration for the development of the new PD model for educational technology of teachers.

According to Wenger (1998), members of a community are brought together by joining in common activities and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities. Applying this concept to education, members of a school, including students, teachers and the principal, form a community.

The ideas of CoP could be further elaborated as: “The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. […] In other words, it involves practice: ways of doing and approaching things that are shared to some significant extent among members” (Smith, 2004).

Continuous Professional Development

We find that the concept of community of practice is closely related to the guiding principles and beliefs of the continuous professional development (CPD) of teachers, which are stated as follows (ACTEQ, 2003; p. 7):

z as professionals, teachers should be well-equipped with subject and pedagogical knowledge, professional skills and supporting attitudes and values;

z teachers have a responsibility to be professionally up to date and to strive for continuous personal growth and professional excellence through lifelong learning;

z teachers as professionals also have a responsibility to facilitate the professional growth and development of their colleagues;

z individual teachers can choose to specialize or excel in particular dimensions of schoolwork as they grow in professional maturity;

z schools should be developed as professional learning communities, teachers’

professional development should be regarded as an important force in school development;

z different schools may like to develop distinctive versions of the teacher competencies framework (TCF) appropriate to their philosophies and circumstances.

Learning Organization

To implement the guiding principles and beliefs of the continuous professional development (CPD) of teachers, a school community should grow to become a learning organization. The learning organization (Watkins & Marsick, 1993; p. 8) learns continuously and transforms itself. Learning occurs in individuals, teams and

organizations, and even the communities within which the organization interacts.

Hence, a learning organization (Kerka, 1995) promotes a culture of learning, a community of learning.

Change, learning, and adaptation have all been used to refer to the process by which organizations adjust to their environment (Fiol & Lyles, 1985). Lorange (1996) argues that both at individual and organizational levels, learning has to be inspired by change and rapid change leads to strong pressure to learn. In contrast, Fiol and Lyles (1985) clarifies the distinction between organizational learning and organizational adaptation and argues that change does not necessarily imply learning and there are different levels of learning occurred in organizations. Learning is “the development of insights, knowledge, and associations between past actions, the effectiveness of those actions and future actions”, whereas adaptation is “the ability to make incremental adjustments as a result of environmental changes, goal structure changes, or other changes” (Fiol & Lyles, 1985; p. 811).

In any effort to foster schools that learn, changes will make a difference only if they take place at all three nested systems, namely the classroom, the school, and the community. These interdependent systems are deeply embedded in daily life with interwoven patterns of influence (Senge et al., 2000). The three prime components of the learning classroom are teachers, students, and parents. The learning school provides an organizational infrastructure to sustain classroom activities, which involves active players such as superintendents, principals, school leaders, and school board members. The learning community, the most complex level, is the learning environment within the school operates, which involves influences draw from the character of local, regional, and international community. Furthermore, every organization is a product of how its members think and interact. Senge et al. (2000) further illustrates: “changing the way we think means continually shifting our point of orientation”, and “changing the way we interact means re-designing not just the formal structures of the organization, but the hard-to-see patterns of relationships among people and other aspects of the system, including the systems of knowledge”

(p. 20). Thus, the case analysis presented in this study focuses on how principals, teachers, and students think and interact in the processes of initiating and implementing pedagogical innovations.

Fostering a Professional Culture and School Change

Based on the concepts described above, it is imperative for us to discuss the building of professional culture. Strong professional learning cultures are vital to school improvement and raising student achievement. It is critical that teachers be equipped

with knowledge and skills that enable them to build and sustain performance-oriented cultures. School programs and policies should support teachers' professional growth;

empower them to make instructional decisions to improve student achievement; and allow time for them to meet, plan, and reflect on practice (Bobbett, 2002).

In recent years, a culture of CPD has been thriving among principals and teachers in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, a number of studies have found a disjoint between calls for reform and actual educational practice. This is due, in part, to the lack of effective models to support professional development of teachers and principals.

Professional development models cannot simply be imposed, rather, we must create environments that provide teachers and principals with ongoing support for change that are situated in and address their practical needs. Teachers and principals need to have the opportunities to participate in discussion, reflection, and action that promote curriculum innovation as well as idea exchange for generating new ways of pedagogical practices using ICT.

To sustain and transfer the SITES M2 experiences to assist Hong Kong schools to carry out innovations, professional development program with the focus of school curriculum innovations should be provided to professionals working at various levels in schools, including principals, curriculum developers, IT-coordinators and subject teachers. Thus, it is important to develop a multi-level professional development model and to implement a scalable and sustainable on-line professional development program which enables school professionals to undertake curriculum innovations in their workplaces.