Purpose: This paper explores the role of professional collaboration and agency during the global COVID-19 pandemic and possible lessons for the future from the perspective of a teacher, leader and postgraduate researcher.Design/methodology/approach: This essay explores the complex role of collaboration and agency in responding to the challenges arising during the global COVID-19 pandemic utilizing research as well as the author's lived experience.Findings: The author finds that through a renewed emphasis on effective professional collaboration and agency, not only are there opportunities to embed lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is also scope to work towards education systems that reflect the complex global socio-political contexts communities may find themselves in and the evolving needs that result from them.Originality/value: This paper offers insights into the work of teachers and school leaders, the increasing complexity of their roles over time, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, considering what this might mean for the future.

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to define pracademia and conceptualise it in relation to educational contexts. This paper contributes to and stimulates a continuing and evolving conversation around pracademia and its relevance, role and possibilities.Design/methodology/approach: This paper is a conceptual exploration. It draws upon existing and emerging pieces of literature, the use of metaphor as a meaning-making tool, and the positionalities of the authors, to develop the concept of pracademia.Findings: The authors posit that pracademics who simultaneously straddle the worlds of practice, policy, and academia embody new possibilities as boundary spanners in the field of education for knowledge mobilization, networks, community membership, and responding to systemic challenges. However, being a pracademic requires the constant reconciling of the demands of multi-membership and ultimately, pracademics must establish sufficient legitimacy to be respected in two or more currently distinct worlds.Practical implications: This paper has implications for knowledge mobilization, networks, boundary spanners, leadership, professional learning, and connecting practice, policy, and research. While the authors are in the field of education, this exploration of pracademia is relevant not only to the field of education but also to other fields in which there is a clear need to connect practice/policy with scholarship.Originality/value: This paper provides a new definition of pracademia and argues that pracademia identifies an important yet relatively unknown space with many possibilities in the field of education.

In this paper, we review the challenges of sustaining effective teacher professional learning in Hong Kong and propose that professional learning could enable teacher innovation, and teacher innovation reversely rejuvenates professional learning. We also argue that greater exploration is needed of how professional learning is theorised in relation to broader themes that influence it. These key themes explored have significant implications for both organisational and wider systemic culture and practice both in Hong Kong and in systems around the world.

This study examines the joint impact of principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of instructional leadership on teacher collaboration. Using Programme for International Student Assessment 2022 data from Hong Kong, we employ polynomial regression with response surface methodology to understand how perceptual congruence and incongruence are associated with teachers’ collaborative practices. The findings reveal a U-shaped relationship for both congruence and incongruence: Collaboration is higher when principal and teacher perceptions align at high or low levels, compared to when their views converge around the mean. Collaboration also increases with perceptual disagreement, where one party's ratings are higher than the other's. These dynamics are significantly amplified in contexts where teachers report high levels of trust in their principals and colleagues, underscoring trust as a key moderating factor that enhances the benefits of both perceptual alignment and misalignment. The findings suggest that cultivating trust can be a critical strategy for leveraging perceptual dynamics to strengthen teacher collaboration. By adopting a congruence perspective and addressing methodological limitations, this study contributes to a more dyadic and relational understanding of the relationship between instructional leadership and teacher collaboration.