From school partnership to university-school-community partnership model of teacher professional development for inclusive education in Hong Kong

For the implementation of whole school approach on inclusion in Hong Kong, the Education Bureau (EDB) formulated a teacher professional development framework for enhancing the competency of ordinary school teachers to cater for students' diverse learning needs. EDB also introduced a School Partnership Scheme for special school teachers to share their experience of teaching children with special educational needs (SEN) with ordinary school teachers. While universities and special schools are working towards the same goal of enabling ordinary school teachers to gain competence in taking care of SEN students, the two parties work independently of each other. The present research aims at examining how special schools and universities can work in collaboration to achieve the mission of upgrading ordinary school teachers' capacity to put integrated education into action. The Hong Kong Institute of Education and six schools and that joined the EDB School Partnership Scheme were invited to participate in the present research. The teacher educators, principal and teachers were interviewed. They were asked to talk about their aims and experience in supporting ordinary schools, as well as their perceived roles and difficulties in enhancing the professional development of their ordinary school peers. They were also invited to express their views about developing partnership with teacher education institutions for promoting teachers' professional development for integrated education. Provided with the themes generated from the interview data, the paper will discuss the significance of the teacher professional development model that involves not only universities and schools, but also the community. This partnership mode will shed light to the future teacher training in inclusion.