Promoting sustainable teacher development: Hong Kong Continuing Professional Development Hub (HKCPD)

Abstract

Continuing professional development is a social, ongoing, in-context and inquiry driven process which can contribute effectively to the growth of teachers, students and institutions (Borg, 2015). However teacher professional development conventionally takes the form of in-house workshops or “one-shot” seminars at individual universities with little collaboration and very few follow-up activities. This paper reports on a government funded inter-institutional research project on establishing a Hong Kong Continuing Professional Development Hub (HKCPD Hub) with the aim at providing a collaborative and sustainable platform for Hong Kong university English teachers to share teaching and research news and resources; to co-run teacher development activities; and to seed communities for teachers who share similar professional interests and research foci. The HKCPD Hub currently has five communities: pedagogy; curriculum design; EAP and ESP; assessment; and technology. The presentation will outline the rationale, the framework and the accomplishments of this current project before discussing the findings of the quantitative and qualitative data collected from the participants of hub events and the user feedback on the hub website.