Charting the Professional Development Journey of Irish Primary Teachers as They Engage in Lesson Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The research purpose is interesting and is clearly stated. Also an appropriate method of sudy is applied. Also prospects for further researh are provided. However there are some minor points, whice author should consider in order to improve the paper.

-Specifically, the answer of reseach question isn't specifying. I suggest to enrich the part of thecher's belifs regrarding the susstaninable model of PD.

-The content should be described more succinctly by the previous and present theoritical backgrouds and empirical research.

-There should be more cohensive connection between the conclusions and discussion.

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback. Please find our response in the attached document.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review

 

This is an interesting, well-structured, and well-written paper on a very relevant topic given the prominence that lesson study got as a professional development process.

The paper does not have an explicit introduction, albeit the first section (1.Desired features…) seems to play that role. However, there are no research questions in this section, and it would be desirable to have them. The research questions are only presented at the end of p. 5.

Section 2 is about Professional Development in Ireland. This section is concise but quite informative for an international reader.

Section 3 presents lesson study, in two subsections, concerning Japan and outside Japan. I find this section very informative. However, the distinction of roles of “facilitator” and “knowledgeable other” (roles that will appear recurrently throughout the paper) is not very clear. The paper says what the facilitator does, but does not say what is the knowledgeable other does.

Section 4 does a brief literature review on research on lesson study. I find this section appropriate for the purposes of the paper.

Section 5 is very brief and presents the Context of the study. At the end, it indicates two research questions. I think most of the information of this section (including the research questions) could be presented in an Introduction that would read as a real introduction.

Section 6 is about the Methodology and has three subsections. The first one is “Context and participants”. So, we have “context” for a second time… Just one section or subsection for context would be all right. The other two subsections are on data collection and data analysis and their content is quite informative. The option for a grounded theory approach, coupled with an extensive literature review, seems to me adjusted to the aims of the paper. The themes, subthemes and codes seem appropriate.

Section 7 is makes the Discussion of the findings. Perhaps this subtitle should be changed since there is little discussion here and there is another section named Discussion and Conclusions (Section 8). The structure of this section is very strange. There is a first subsection (7.1) with just three lines. This subsection should be larger, including as sub-subsections (7.2), (7.3) and (7.4). The same applies to subsection (7.4) that should include two sub-sub-subsections (7.5) and (7.6). Or, perhaps the whole structure could be revised keeping the subsections as they are and making an encompassing introduction to the whole section. The same problem appears with subsection (7.8) with 6 lines and that should include (7.9) and (7.10). In all this section 7, the distinction between data and analysis/interpretation is not very clear, and the formatting of the paper could be improved to clarify this (using italics or indentations).

Section 8 is Discussion and Conclusions. The paper does a very good job in discussing the findings previously presented. Some limitations are also indicated. However, I think that the paper would improve by separating the discussion from the conclusion. The role of the conclusion would be to summarize the main findings and indicate what this study brought in terms of increased knowledge regarding existing literature.

The paper reads very well. However, in the abstract, the sentence beginning “Within…” does not seem to be complete.

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback. Please find attached our response to each of your comments in the attached document. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf