Teaching development grants final and financial report: Reflective journal writing and interview skills of pre-service teachers on professional moral attributes: Learning from frontline teachers

An important part of the Institute’s vision is nurturing competent and caring professionals. To develop pre-service teachers into full professionals well-prepared for lifelong learning, language skills and moral attributes development are among the most important areas. The QAC has invited all institutions to step up efforts in enhancing students' proficiency in Chinese. Language enhancement is one of the key areas of development in the Institute’s 2012-15 Academic Development Proposal. Pre-service teachers should well develop their Chinese communication skills to meet the needs of their future career. On the other hand, although a set of recognized ethical standards has been identified in the Code for the Education Profession of Hong Kong (Council on Professional Conduct in Education, 1995), pre-service teachers may need guidance to put it into practice in actual school context. Moral and Civic Education is one of the essential learning experiences of Hong Kong school education which extends across all the eight key learning areas of basic education (The Curriculum Development Council, 2002), but there are no explicit aims and objectives on values and attitudes deemed essential for students being listed in most subjects' curriculum guides. It is crucial for all pre-service teachers to develop essential moral attributes themselves before taking up the responsibility of the moral development of the students entrusted to their care. This project will collect frontline teachers' views on professional moral attributes through a questionnaire survey. About 20 BEd students majoring in any subjects will be recruited and trained. They will then interview frontline teachers of different years of experience so as to gather stories of their personal experiences and opinions on attributes highlighted by the questionnaire results. These student teachers are expected to write a reflective journal on these interviews, indicating how they have learnt from these frontline teachers on professional moral attributes development. The outcomes of the questionnaire survey and interviews are for easy identification by student teachers to set goals for their growth. The reflective journals will be edited and presented online as self-access learning package to promote a sense of professionalism. This project can serve as a pilot for a larger scale research project on Hong Kong teachers' professional moral attributes development.