Enhancing the Quality of Our Graduates
	Building up team spirit through rich hostel life.

As an institution that focuses on meeting the needs of Hong Kong schools, we are naturally keen to ensure that our graduates will meet, if not exceed, the expectations of their employers, Hong Kong's school principals. We therefore conduct surveys on an annual basis to gauge the performance of our graduates by enquiring into their levels of personal satisfaction and the level of satisfaction among the principals who employ them. We are gratified to report that the 2003-04 feedback again confirmed that graduates perceive themselves to be well prepared for the workplace and employers hold an extremely positive view of their capability. Graduates found our programmes very useful in preparing them for their careers as professional teachers, citing the areas of IT training, personality development, subject knowledge, and preparation for employment as being of particular significance. Principals were particularly impressed by their sense of responsibility, willingness to learn, enthusiasm and Chinese language skills - all qualities considered to be crucial in the teaching profession.

Triumphing in a Difficult Environment
The market for teachers has seen many changes in recent years as a result of the declining school age student population. Despite this difficult environment, our graduates have fared comparatively well in securing employment. According to our annual Graduate Employment Survey, 96 percent of our 2003 graduates had either secured jobs or were pursuing further studies. Also helping our graduates up the career ladder, many of our past students continued to offer valuable guidance to fresh graduates in their job search strategies through our Alumni Network. This year we also organised a programme to allow past graduates to share their experience with their younger counterparts in career choice issues.

Driving Excellence in Teaching
A unique feature of the Institute's educators is that they have themselves chosen the teaching profession as a career. This experience, their genuine concern for students and driving mission to help students learn - the hallmarks of truly dedicated teachers - translate into a positive teaching environment and quality teacher education for our students. Acting as role models, our educators constantly work towards all-round excellence in education, inspiring our students to emulate the same high standards.

Teaching excellence is further encouraged by the strong emphasis placed on teaching quality in academic staff performance appraisal. In 2003-04, a new staff appraisal scheme, specially designed to promote continuous self-assessment and improvement among our academic staff, was introduced. Under this new scheme, the quality of teaching represents the most heavily weighted factor.

Our Distinguished Teacher Awards (DTA), organised biennially, provide further encouragement and recognition for excellence in teaching. 'Distinguished Teachers' are nominated by their students or colleagues to enter the award process. To gain the award, they must demonstrate innovative teaching practices, a commitment to enhanced teaching, engagement in systematic enquiry into teaching with collegial sharing of outcomes, care and concern for student development, ongoing contributions to curriculum development and professionalism, together with a robust and deeply considered philosophy of teaching.

In 2003-04, the DTA Selection Panel went through a rigorous process to review the nominees. At the end, the Award went to Dr Magdalena Mok of the Department of Educational Psychology, Counselling and Learning Needs, whose education philosophy is elaborated in her quote in the latter part of this Report.