ABSTRACT
Primary and secondary education has witnessed a proliferation of ways to address problems: learning problems, behaviour problems, personnel problems and school climate problems. A great deal of energy is spent considering how to motivate reluctant students, how to intervene in learning problems, ways to provide quality professional development for faculty and, most importantly, how to ensure quality of instruction through teacher appraisal systems. Although well intended, such approaches rest on the assumption that in order to effect positive change, the problem itself must be described and analysed to determine causality, defi ne outcomes and determine the best actions to fi x what is perceived as broken. This is no clearer than in a large international school in Hong Kong where issues ranging from parental pressure for increasingly higher academic achievement to the evaluation and supervision of teachers and school counsellors are keenly focused on identifying areas for improvement.
