The Why of the Teaching Profession: Validation of a Structural Model of Teacher Motivations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to raise the following concerns for the author(s)' reference for them to make improvement of the manuscript.

1) I think they need to rephrase most of the paragraphs. I find almost all paragraphs only have one to three sentences and the conjunction between paragraphs is week. Thus, it seems to me that the author(s) just write the manuscript in point-form. Such presentation style is not scholarly enough.

2) I'm not sure why the author(s) need develop a new instrument (CUMODE). There are many validated measures to assess teacher motivation. Therefore, why do the author(s) dissatisfy with them? And how the CUMODE offsets limitations of the existing measure? I think the author(s) need to provide a more extensive and critical review of the literature regarding the measures for teacher motivation.

3) The research is conducted in the context of Tenerife. I would like to know more about the educational context and the issue related to teacher motivation there in order to help me make sure of the significance of the study for international and global context. Or the author(s) can tell me more about their thoughts on the international and global significance of their study.

4) I find the author(s) conducted content analysis for questionnaire development before the validation study. I would like to know more about the details of that part. For example, how did they collect the data (interview, focus group, or questionnaire) and how did they analyze the data in order to generate the themes for questionnaire?

Author Response

RESPONSE TO REVIEWER 1:

1) I think they need to rephase most of the paragraphs. I find almost all paragraphs only have one to three sentences and the conjunction between paragraphs is week. Thus, it seems to me that the author(s) just write the manuscript in point-form. Such presentation style is not scholarly enough.

The writing style of the introduction has been modified to meet the reviewer's requirements.

2) I'm not sure why the author(s) need develop a new instrument (CUMODE). There are many validated measures to assess teacher motivation. Therefore, why do the author(s) dissatisfy with them? And how the CUMODE offsets limitations of the existing measure? I think the author(s) need to provide a more extensive and critical review of the literature regarding the measures for teacher motivation.

The questionnaires, inventories and scales, located in the theoretical review we have carried out, focus on measuring the motivation of the teaching population from the perspective of self-efficacy as well as professional competences and skills to motivate students. These types of instruments are linked to the Self-Determination Theory and isolate aspects such as teacher expectations and achievement motivation of teachers, which are far from the objectives of our research, which are more related to the reasons that lead active teachers and student teachers to stay, train and develop their teaching career and vocation, from the perspective of the needs covered by the teacher.

Expanding our review with WOS search engines, we have found two inventories applied to teachers: one, focused on work motivation, The Work Tasks Motivation Scale for Teachers by Fernet et al. (2008) validated in the Spanish context by Ruiz (2015). And another, by Valenzuela et al. (2012), which measures teachers' self-efficacy in generating school motivation for students.

None of them respond to the interests of our research, as they do not provide factors focused on the motives that cover the different types of needs (security, affiliation and fulfillment) that teachers have when teaching and which, therefore, guide their decisions as educational professionals.

We therefore believe that it was necessary to provide a new evaluation instrument, the CUMODE, with the psychometric guarantees necessary to empirically collect the motivations of the teaching staff.

3) The research is conducted in the context of Tenerife. I would like to know more about the educational context and the issue related to teacher motivation there in order to help me make sure of the significance of the study for international and global context. Or the author(s) can tell me more about their thoughts on the international and global significance of their study.

Teachers in Europe, Careers, Development and Well-being (Eurydice Report), points out that the teaching profession has been experiencing a professional crisis for a number of years, making it unattractive to young people. Many European education systems are suffering from a shortage of teachers and national and European policy makers are seeking to identify the factors that make the profession increasingly unattractive.

Proposals being formulated internationally are geared towards reforms and new policies in areas such as initial teacher education, continuing professional development, working conditions, teaching careers, teacher evaluation and teacher welfare. And to design effective policies, evidence is needed on what works and under what circumstances.

It is clear that motivated teachers are one of the essential prerequisites for an education system in which pupils from diverse backgrounds can thrive and reach their full potential.

In Spain and the Canary Islands, changes in educational legislation have led to an increase in administrative requirements and significant curricular and methodological changes to better cater for the diversity of students in increasingly inclusive classrooms. All of this is sustained by the motivation and effort of an increasingly exhausted teaching staff. It should be noted that during the 2020 pandemic, the latest education law (LOMLOE) was passed.

We understand that this is not a local situation in Tenerife, or even in Spain, but a global one, in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world that defines challenging educational contexts, greatly diminishing the attractiveness of the teaching profession and careers. We find timely the perspective of the ET 2020 Working Group on Schools which calls for a change of perspective: to move from the view of teaching as an isolated, confined and one-dimensional profession, to teaching as a role interconnected with the wider family of school education professions, allowing each individual to evolve towards multiple, diversified and enriching career paths (European Commission, 2020).

4) I find the author(s) conducted content analysis for questionnaire development before the validation study. I would like to know more about the details of that part. For example, how did they collect the data (interview, focus group, or questionnaire) and how did they analyze the data in order to generate the themes for questionnaire?

As indicated in the method section of the paper, the instrument used in our research was constructed on the basis of a questionnaire consisting of three open-ended questions. Specifically, these were: What are the incentives you get from being a teacher? What are the needs you satisfy by being a teacher? What is the real, intimate and personal motivation that keeps you motivated to continue teaching? The answers to these questions were classified, according to the content of the expressions, into the three categories corresponding to the three theoretical factors, which we sought to confirm through subsequent statistical analyses.

This pre-instrument was applied to two samples of subjects: The first sample consisted of 22 primary school students (75% female and 25% male, aged between 17 and 19). A second sample of 51 subjects, also trainee teachers, in this case from the Master's degree in secondary education teacher training (57.2% women and 42.8% men, aged between 21 and 47). And a third sample of 74 active teachers (69.9 women and 30.1 men, aged between 23 and 59).

It should be noted that in the case of the first two samples, the open-ended questions were adapted to their status as trainee teachers in the following terms: What are the INCENTIVES I will achieve when I reach the goal of becoming a teacher? What are the NEEDS I seek to fulfill by becoming a teacher? What is my real, intimate and personal MOTIVATION for becoming a teacher?

With regard to the analysis of the responses to this questionnaire, it should be noted that our aim was not to draw conclusions from the responses collected, but rather to collect natural expressions from the subjects with which to elaborate the closed items of our instrument. This was a preliminary phase aimed at developing a battery of response items for a closed-ended question. The coding process was therefore relatively simple as it consisted of selecting expressions that represented the content of the three theoretical categories from which we started (professional well-being, social bonding and teaching achievement) and establishing a logical correspondence between the expression and the category. Therefore, it was not necessary to carry out any kind of textual statistical analysis, as the objective of this phase, which was instrumental in nature, did not require it.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Article “The why of the teaching profession. Validation of a structural model of teacher motivations”.

General considerations:

1. The theme is relevant and useful to the scope of the journal;

2. The objectives are clear, measured and realised;

3. There is an objective sequence of the process and presentation of the idea, its development and results;

4. The bibliographical references are current and globally relevant to the body of the manuscript.

Changes to be made to the manuscript:

1. Need for global (formal) uniformising of the manuscript template (e.g. 26,31,36, 159, 186, 202, 213, 226, 236, etc.). Spaces between paragraphs and tables need to be completely revised;

2. There should be a specific item to indicate and delineate the limitations of the study;

3. A summary table with the main results obtained should be included to visually and graphically better understand the results of the study itself;

4. A detailed discussion of each significant result of the study should be included to better assess its value and provide an example for future work in the area;

5. The conclusions should incorporate a space to identify and advance future perspectives. For, in addition to the manuscript having some data and suggestions for the future, it should also specify a little more when this situation occurs.

In short, if these suggestions are realised, the manuscript will be able to be considered for publication.

Author Response

RESPONSE TO REVIEWER 2:

1. Need for global (formal) uniformising of the manuscript template (e.g. 26,31,36, 159, 186, 202, 213, 226, 236, etc.). Spaces between paragraphs and tables need to be completely revised.

The manuscript has been modified as indicated by the reviewer.

2. There should be a specific item to indicate and delineate the limitations of the study.

A specific item has been included detailing the limitations of the study. This improvement can be located on the following lines 517-527

3. A summary table with the main results obtained should be included to visually and graphically better understand the results of the study itself.

A summary table with the main results obtained on the line 426 is included.

4. A detailed discussion of each significant result of the study should be included to better assess its value and provide an example for future work in the area.

A discussion of the significant results of our study is given in the corresponding section. However, as they are developed in a discursive style to avoid a schematic point-by-point format (as the other reviewer requested in his report), they may not have been fully explained. This is why we maintain the same wording, as we consider it more appropriate, although in consideration of the reviewer's indication we detail each of the results with their corresponding discussion:

RESULT 1: Validation of the CUMODE assessment instrument and the structural model of factors organise teacher motivations.

• TEXT OF THE DISCUSSION RELATING TO RESULT 1: 434-477

RESULT 2: Confirmation of the vocational nature of the teaching profession.

• TEXT OF THE DISCUSSION RELATING TO RESULT 2: 478-488

RESULT 3: Unbalanced distribution of the relevance of the individual factors.

• TEXT OF THE DISCUSSION RELATING TO RESULT 3: 489-517

5. The conclusions should incorporate a space to identify and advance future perspectives. For, in addition to the manuscript having some data and suggestions for the future, it should also specify a little more when this situation occurs.

A specific section has been added to the text identifying future research perspectives, as well as new lines of continuity for our work. This improvement can be found in the lines 529-546

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks very much for the revision and the responses.

I think the authors respond well but they don't sufficiently show their response in the manuscript. For example, they give a reason why they need to construct a new instrument because their review find that the existing scales has certain limitation in the Response. However, they don't provide the extensive critical review of the existing instruments in the manuscript. They should do that! Moreover, similarly, they explain very well about the context of Tenerife and its global relevance to me, but they don't tell it to their audience in the manuscript. Why? They should do the same in the manuscript.

Therefore, I highly recommend them to revise again and provide the sufficient information in their article.

Author Response

DEAR REVIEWER In response to the indications you have given us, in order to improve our article, we inform you of the changes. We appreciate the review process, as it is extremely interesting to reflect and always improve.   Best regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf