PU-PS-03-Pang

Title:
Sustaining School Improvement through School-University Partnership

Presenters:
Professor Nicholas Sun-Keung Pang, Department of Education, Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Email: xqpeng@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn

Abstract:

Globalization and changes in information processing within the last four decades have great impacts on education systems and organizations. Now, almost daily, educators are confronted with demands from the society to reform the organizational structures and educational processes. Sustaining school improvement is one of the most important and difficult responsibilities of school leaders. Effective leaders need to focus on revitalization of their organizations and adaptation to changing environments. This paper explores the various basic strategies that effective leaders may adopt to sustain school improvement and to compare their effectiveness.

            In recent years, the Hong Kong Education Bureau has implemented a two-pronged approach to assuring the quality of school education in Hong Kong: an external mechanism via inspection and an internal framework via self-evaluation. However, both of which are not effective as expected. It is to argue that school-university partnership on school improvement may be an effective way to initiate, lead, and sustain school improvement and to assure the quality of education. Schools can only improve continuously when they have institutionalized a self-evaluation framework in daily practice. In summing the experiences of the details of a series of school-university partnership projects on school improvement in Hong Kong, and setting in context, this paper reports on an examination of the issues in school-university partnership and to explore the characteristics and conditions for effective school-university partnership.

Keywords:
School improvement, Self-evaluation, school-university partnership, organizational change, education reform, Hong Kong