Abstract
While technology use is becoming increasingly common in education, teachers remain reluctant to use it and hesitant on how best to incorporate it into their teaching and practice. There is a strong demand from institutions for English language teachers to cope with the changing landscape of teaching in the 21st century. This explorative study investigated Hong Kong tertiary teachers’ beliefs on continuing professional development activities to enhance their teaching. The study had a two-phase research design, with an initial questionnaire (N = 58) followed by semistructured interviews (N = 12) to unpack the participants’ hidden voices. The findings illustrated that most teachers are enthusiastic about professional development activities, though there is a misalignment between what universities value and reward and what teachers see as most beneficial for enhancing their teaching practices. The results suggested that professional development activities should focus on sharing good teaching practice (e.g., informal chats, mentoring) within universities rather than on rewarding attending conferences and on-off, nonintegrated workshops.
Highlights
While technology use is becoming increasingly common in education, teachers remain reluctant to use technology and hesitant on how best to incorporate it into their teaching and practice
The mean scores for Item 2, Item 3, and Item 4 were greater than 2, indicating that participants engaged in these three professional development activities moderately often
This study has found that teachers favored more informal types of continuing professional development, such as sharing good teaching practice in the use/adoption of information communication technologies (ICT) with colleagues for enhancing their existing teaching practice
Summary
While technology use is becoming increasingly common in education, teachers remain reluctant to use technology and hesitant on how best to incorporate it into their teaching and practice. There is a strong demand from institutions for English language teachers to cope with the changing landscape of teaching in the twenty-first century This explorative study investigated Hong Kong tertiary teachers’ beliefs on continuing professional development activities to enhance their teaching. As in other parts of the world, technology has become an integral part of learning and teaching in Hong Kong (Hyland & Wong, 2013), and technology use continues to evolve as English language teachers both aspire and struggle to embrace it (Healey, 2018; Knobel & Kalman, 2016; Stockwell, 2018).
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