Developing continuing professional education for teachers

There are still over 14,000 primary teachers and 4,500 secondary teachers in Hong Kong schools who do not have a degree, and there are large number of teachers in both primary and secondary schools who are teaching subjects without either the academic or professional qualifications that would normally be required in an advanced education system. There is also the ongoing need for all teachers, whether qualified or not, to keep up with advances in academic subject knowledge, with good practices in teaching and learning, and with how best to harness new technologies to educational purposes. This paper will draw on the experience of setting up a Division of Continuing Professional Education in the Hong Kong Institute of Education, and put forward a range of ideas for the development of a more robust, better articulated and higher quality continuing professional education scene for teachers in Hong Kong.