The Relationship between Professional Environmental Factors and Teacher Professional Development in Israeli Schools
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Paper: The Relationship between Professional Learning Community, Self-Efficacy, Professional Identity, Perceptions of the Principal's Transformation Leadership Patterns and Teacher Professional Development [TPD] in Israeli Primary Education Schools.
The title is rather long. It would be important if the authors could rethink the title to make it shorter.
Teacher professional development is a topic that is not recent, but remains current. There is a lot of diverse literature as well as different angles of analysis. In terms of literature review, the work has some relevance.
The practical research component is based on an investigation supported by descriptive statistics. It can be considered well done in terms of research design and treatment of results. The authors should further clarify if the sample is representative of the population or if there was no concern with this representativeness.
In the results discussion section, the concern with answering the research questions is barely perceptible. For example, if the research has as one of its objectives: What relationship exists among the professional learning community, self-efficacy, professional identity, principal's transformation leadership style, and teacher professional development? The authors should try to answer this question.
This relationship is also in the title, so the authors should clearly address this relationship.
In the discussion of the results, the other research questions should be answered.
In the conclusion, the authors can focus on answering the research objective.
Author Response
1.Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Paper: The Relationship between Professional Learning Community, Self-Efficacy, Professional Identity, Perceptions of the Principal's Transformation Leadership Patterns and Teacher Professional Development [TPD] in Israeli Primary Education Schools.
The title is rather long. It would be important if the authors could rethink the title to make it shorter.
We have changed the title to: The Relationship between Professional Environmental Factors and Teacher Professional Development in Israeli Schools
Teacher professional development is a topic that is not recent, but remains current. There is a lot of diverse literature as well as different angles of analysis. In terms of literature review, the work has some relevance.
The practical research component is based on an investigation supported by descriptive statistics. It can be considered well done in terms of research design and treatment of results. The authors should further clarify if the sample is representative of the population or if there was no concern with this representativeness.
Thank you. We have added a strengths section to the discussion and have added the following: “This study had many strengths. We included a relatively large sample size from five different districts throughout the country, making our sample representative of the total population.”
In the results discussion section, the concern with answering the research questions is barely perceptible. For example, if the research has as one of its objectives: What relationship exists among the professional learning community, self-efficacy, professional identity, principal's transformation leadership style, and teacher professional development? The authors should try to answer this question. This relationship is also in the title, so the authors should clearly address this relationship.
In the discussion of the results, the other research questions should be answered.
Thank you for pointing out these points. We have added information to lines 315-323
In the conclusion, the authors can focus on answering the research objective.
Thank you, we have added information the conclusions section, lines 371-378.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Overall this is a strong study that can make an important contribution. I have noted suggestions below.
Introduction
- The first few lines (29-35) include broad generalizations and platitudes that do not add to the research context or rationale
- line 35. What 'challenges' are being referenced here?
Methods
- The sample item for transformational leadership does not appear 'transformational.' Are other items more indicative of the description provided in the literature review?
- Teacher professional development is described in the literature review as 'participation in PD.' However, the sample item appears to be measuring the quality of the engagement.
Results
- Figure 2. Using different indicators (e.g., circles, x's, and boxes) makes the comparison between the factors difficult. Given that the factors a separated and labeled, the variable indicators are unnecessary.
- Table 2 needs to more clearly label the independent and dependent variables. Select horizontal borders would help.
- It is not clear why a step-wise regression was conducted. There should be a research-supported rationale for choosing step-wise and the order of entry for the variables.
- The high correlations between the independent variables raise concerns regarding the distinctiveness of the constructs. This should be addressed in the analysis.
Author Response
2.Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Overall this is a strong study that can make an important contribution. I have noted suggestions below.
We thank the reviewer for this comment.
Introduction
- The first few lines (29-35) include broad generalizations and platitudes that do not add to the research context or rationale-
We have changed the first part of the introduction to as follows lines 26-32
- line 35. What 'challenges' are being referenced here? Together with the change of the beginning of the paragraph, we believe the challenges are clear. We also changed the word “challenges” to “needs”, as it is now clear with the previous sentence.
Methods
- The sample item for transformational leadership does not appear 'transformational.' Are other items more indicative of the description provided in the literature review?
We changed the sample item to be more indicative of the description.
- Teacher professional development is described in the literature review as 'participation in PD.' However, the sample item appears to be measuring the quality of the engagement. Based on Elmore et al. (2014) this measure examines the level of participation with relation to school's overall improvement strategy. We included a different sample item that better reflects this definition "My professional development experiences this year have been valuable to my practice as a teacher".
Results
- Figure 2. Using different indicators (e.g., circles, x's, and boxes) makes the comparison between the factors difficult. Given that the factors a separated and labeled, the variable indicators are unnecessary.
Thanks for this comment. We changed the figure and now all indicators are the same – a black circle.
- Table 2 needs to more clearly label the independent and dependent variables. Select horizontal borders would help.
We added a horizontal border between the dependent and independent variables.
- It is not clear why a step-wise regression was conducted. There should be a research-supported rationale for choosing step-wise and the order of entry for the variables.
After rethinking about the regression analysis, we re-conducted the analysis using multiple regression analyses. We made all the relevant changes to the abstract, data analysis section, results, and Table 4. As the results of the two regression types were similar, no further changes were made in the discussion section.
- The high correlations between the independent variables raise concerns regarding the distinctiveness of the constructs. This should be addressed in the analysis.
Indeed, there were several relatively high correlations between the dependent and the independent variables. Therefore, in the multiple regression analyses, we checked for multicollinearity using variance of inflation factor. The cutoff score for multicollinearity was set to > 10 [reference number 47]. This information is mentioned in the data analysis section. However, per your recommendation, we added the following text to the results section: "Although there were several relatively high correlations between the dependent and the independent variables (r > 0.60), no multicollinearity was detected in the multiple regression analysis (VIF > 10). We also added the following text to the notes of table 4: no multicollinearity was detected in the multiple regression analysis (VIF > 10).
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper has a coherent and logical structure. It arises from relevant sources and the terminology is clear. Statistical processing of data is at a high level. I would just comment on non-traditional determination of independent variables which were assessed on basis of selected items.
Nevertheless, the paper involves all standard parts.
Author Response
3.comments and Suggestions for Authors
The paper has a coherent and logical structure. It arises from relevant sources and the terminology is clear. Statistical processing of data is at a high level. I would just comment on non-traditional determination of independent variables which were assessed on basis of selected items.
Nevertheless, the paper involves all standard parts.
Thank you for your comments. We have made some changes to the methods and hope these are sufficient.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
