School Leaders’ Experiences of Implementing Education for Sustainable Development—Anchoring the Transformative Perspective

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for this interesting study...you are asking questions about how school function - your questions are very pertinent for those of us who support ESD education.

Below are some specific observations regarding the manuscript:

You need to use a few more commas, and edit sentence structure for clarity; a few more hyphens would also be helpful e.g. student-centered organization

Some English usage problems…I suggest a good edit for English grammar and syntax, and consistent verb tenses. There are small issues throughout.

e.g. 

Policy documents linked to research and politics such as the UN Agenda 2030 [8] describes the educational sector as important for moving away from unsustainable development.

Policy documents linked to research and politics, such as the UN Agenda 2030 [8], describe the educational sector as being an important factor in addressing unsustainable development.

46.  what is an ‘anchor’ - explain this when you introduce the term (use brackets if necessary).

41, 52 vs 58 - decide on a verb tense for your study and stick to it…usually should be past tense.

75 This sentence doesn’t make sense…rewrite please

83 attend to verb usage through out the manuscript

e.g.Structural implementation programs of ESD (are) a common way…

185 identify the sentences as points by using letters or numbers (a. b. c. or 1. 2. 3.) and edit so they are grammatically similar.

357 under Data Collection you only talk about interviews with school leaders, but in the next section you discuss teacher surveys…were the surveys not part of data collection? please clarify

472-84  align the second column

509 - you provide quotes from school leaders…were these originally taken in Swedish? and then translated into English?  please clarify for the reader.

Author Response

Hi!

I enlose a file with Author response to reviewer!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The introduction addresses many concepts on the subject of the study but has a problem and is the poor relationship between the concepts that are being studied. It is recommended to make a deep revision of this section and to reduce it as much as possible.

The leaders analyzed are very few (N = 10) but the author describes in a very effective way the interview collection process.

The discussion should be more selective

The bibliographical references are not adequate, an in-depth review should be carried out

Author Response

Hi!

I enlose a file with author response to reviewer!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors, 

The manuscript was a real pleasure to read and offered important insights on education (in general) and especially on `education for sustainable development`. However, there are a few limitations and shortcomings which hamper your arguments and influence the academic soundness of your article in a negative way.  As such, please consider the following issues:

  Although the manuscript is written in a clear, concise and correct way, there are still small language mistakes (typos) or sections which could be rephrased in order to ensure better clarity. See for example   

75 The invest.igation on transmissive emphasized quality at school organization in this study

76 relates to the problems appointed school programs to scale up a more transformative ESD

77 implementation.

or 

827 School leaders of schools less focused

or 

Our study contributes insights into which domains of the school organization school leaders

816 believe require structures and routines in order to anchor

- please ensure that your manuscript is further proofread by a native speaker who is familiar with the topic at hand. 

2. Your argue that 

154 The basic assumption of this paper is that since we can confirm that our sample contains some

155 of the most ESD active schools in Sweden (later defined) the generic quality identified at these schools

156 can be considered to represent the ´firm ground´ of ESD implementation at these schools.

- are you sure that your findings are objective / unbiased and can be generalized to a broader context considering the sample selection?

- could you please comment on this issue and highlight potential sample limitations in order to ensure full academic honesty and for readers to be able to better asses the soundness of your manuscripts

3. The sentences included in lines 185 to 191 should be changes to list format (bullet points)

4. You argue that 

It

262 resembles Max Weber’s ideas of rational organizations and transmissive qualities in school

263 organization [51]. There is some similarity between Max Weber’s ideas of rational organizations and

264 school organizations that have an emphasis on transmissive qualities.

- could you please dwell more (provide more details) on the similarities and differences between the two concepts?

5. The Transformative quality Index (TQ index) and the Scherp model were used in your paper but were not explained / described adequately. 

6. The research question `Which domains of the school organization do school leaders find important in anchoring ESD to make it permanent and long lasting when comparing two groups of schools, one group placing high emphasis on transformative perspectives on education, the other placing low emphasis on it` seems to be unnecessarily convoluted and unclear. You should rephrase it to be more crisp, maybe by eliminating the second half ( ... when comparing two groups)

7. Table 1 and Table 2 are not formatted according to the requirements of Sustainability. Please redo/reformat the tables. 

8. Table 1 and Figure 1 are to close together and they seem to be the same image. Please redesign this section in order to make it more clear that they are two different things. 

9. The sentences included in lines 472 to 485 should be changes to list format (bullet points). 

The sentences included in lines 608 to 621 should be changes to list format (bullet points)

10.  Although some are presented during the paper, the last section (7. Conclusions) should include clear public policy recommendations which can be  derived from the results of the authors and taking into account potential methodological limitations. These public policy recommendations should be clear enough for decision makers to understand, feasible enough to be implemented and as detailed as possible.   

Author Response

Hi!

I enclose a file with author response to reviewer!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx