With its mission of expanding and extending the capacity and capability of teachers of English in Hong Kong, the WrITE Project has developed three sets of programmes for teacher professional development: Collaboration Programmes, Continuing-learning Programmes and Community Programmes.

Collaboration Programmes

The first set of programmes is designed to promote and enhance the sharing of experience and knowledge in the teaching and learning of English based on a collaboration or teacher community model. These programmes include:

• Summer Institute

Devoted and excellent teachers of English are invited to participate in Summer Institutes as summer fellows (SFs) to share and learn as a group through a variety of activities. These include the sharing and demonstrating of effective strategies with regard to the teaching of writing; writing in different genres; reading, discussing and responding to articles; participating in peer review/response exercises.

• Coaching and training of Summer Fellows

Summer Fellows are further nurtured as leaders to conduct sharing and collaborative learning programmes with their fellow teachers within and across schools.

• Narrative Inquiry for Professional Development

Personal practical knowledge of teachers is to be extracted from their written narrations. The purpose of this is to help them to critically assess their own strengths and limitations in teaching and, eventually, to assist them in reformulating their teaching strategies including lesson planning and the development of teaching materials.

• Creation of professional learning communities

These communities may exist within multiple perspectives: within a single discipline or across disciplines; within an individual school or across schools; or even across regions/countries. These professional learning communities offer a platform for spontaneous learning and personal growth through a series of collaborative activities. These activities include: writers’ festivals; formal or informal focused group activities such as (informal) study groups on current issues, (formal) collaboration among teachers from different disciplines to work out an integrated curriculum for civic/liberal education; and exchange teacher programmes.

Continuing-learning Programmes

The second set of programmes is developed in light of ongoing school reforms and curriculum changes as well as in response to increasing demands and expectations of parents and students on teachers. Given this set of policy, organizational and social contexts, the conception of teaching as a solitary undertaking is less tenable than it once was. Teachers need to reorient themselves based on reflections on one of these areas; that is: how students learn; how students’ school, family and social lives may be linked together; and how teaching and learning should or could be carried out. Upon such reflection, teachers would embrace the concept of professional development over and above simple career advancement in an effort to strive for the highest quality of education the teaching profession as a whole may be able to achieve.

• ‘Advanced Institutes’ (an extension of the Summer Institute)

The Advanced Institutes may take different formats, for instance, residential institutes, e-learning and sharing. These Advanced Institutes may improve teachers’ subject knowledge and teaching strategies (use of metalanguage in error correction and grammar teaching, for example) through a series of targeted seminars which help to reformulate specific teaching strategies, such as the use of peer response groups in the teaching of writing. Through demonstration and mutual sharing of views and experiences by groups of teachers who have put such reformulated strategies into practice, a new framework may emerge. The resulting framework may then be conceptualized with a view to developing new teaching strategies and/or modifying existing teaching methods based on new findings or to how students learn in English, with findings related to other disciplines, such as neuroscience.

• Creation of teacher professional portfolios

A concrete outcome from the Collaboration Programmes will be teacher professional portfolios. The portfolios will incorporate effective teaching strategies demonstrated, teachers’ relative strengths and limitations in relation to student levels and classroom characteristics. They might cover school culture and the teachers’ development or re-deployment of different and creative methods to meet the requirements of the curriculum. Organization and group dynamics which are key or critical entries to teacher professional portfolios in building teacher communities may be identified from teachers’ written narration. With the teachers’ consent, such portfolios may be updated and exchanged through electronic means.

• Knowledge transfer and exchange

In order for teacher knowledge and expertise to be recognized and shared, a systematic scientific documentation of what teachers do and how teaching and learning is carried out inside and outside the classroom is needed. Action research can help in this regard and such a method requires the collaboration and commitment of teachers to making their knowledge and expertise comprehensible and transferable. Results of action research studies can then be shared in seminars and conferences for local teachers and international audiences.

Community Programmes

While the advancement in teachers’ professional and substantive knowledge is undoubtedly necessary for the enhancement of the teaching and learning of English in Hong Kong , wider community support and understanding of the importance of writing in education is indispensable for WrITE teachers to put their knowledge and skills into practice. The WrITE Project therefore plans to establish partnership with schools and concerned organizations in launching community activities that aim to enable students, parents and the general public to experience the dynamics and the joy of writing. To this end, it is envisaged that the kind of community programmes will be launched along the lines of events such as writers’ festivals, students’ writing camps and parents’ writing workshops.

Platform for Nurturing Teacher Communities

The WrITE e-Group ( http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~write)