Designing and Implementing a Sustainable Cooperative Learning in Physical Education: A Pre-Service Teachers’ Socialization Issue

Reviewer 2 Comments to Author:

            Authors’ revision

The keywords are not enough related to the topic.

The keywords were reconsidered according to the reviewer’s suggestion (see p. 1).

I would strongly recommend correcting the title by including the mentioned keywords pre-service teacher socialization. 

The title was also reconsidered for increasing the relationship with the keywords. The manuscript is now entitled “Designing and Implementing a Sustainable Cooperative Learning in Physical Education: A Pre-Service Teachers’ Socialization Issue”.

It is also necessary to provide the concept and the content for the key terms professional socialization and/or teacher socialization what are used almost in every paragraph.  The professional development process is also mentioned, although the correlation between it and teacher socialization should be justified more.  

In line with the reviewer’s relevant remark, we added information relative to professional socialization (see Introduction section, p. 1, lines 10-12): “According to the occupational socialization theory, “the process whereby the individual becomes a participating member of the society of teachers” (Zeichner & Gore, 1990, p. 329) comprises three phases along a time-oriented continuum (acculturation, professional socialization, and organizational socialization)”. The reference related to Zeichner and Gore’s study was added in the reference section (see p. 13).

Sustainable Cooperative Learning is also analyzed in the article, however, it's not clear what makes this cooperative learning sustainable, because the term sustainable is rarely mentioned in the article, which is in general limited to the analysis of the cooperative learning process. I would recommend justifying this aspect in the conclusions of the article more. I have lacked the justification of the methodology in the article. 

Checking the manuscript, we found 35 occurrences in relation to sustainability. Indeed, the main of them referred to the cooperative learning process with regard to our approach of the thematic in line with the special issue. Nevertheless, the introduction focused on the general-purpose of sustainable development. Furthermore, when we stressed that sustainable environments required coherence and continuity, our purpose of sustainability referred to a general overview of the concept. Because this was not enough clear, we took the precaution of reviewing this sentence accordingly stressing that “Because generally, the concept of sustainability requires coherence and continuity in responsible decision-making and actions, several educational actors need to be adequately involved in this process” (see chapter 4, p. 8). Moreover, the first sentence of the conclusion is used to present our purpose in reference to Incheon Declaration and Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) – Education 2030 Framework for Action (p. 10). This would help to justify our approach to the thematic. Finally, the conclusion was rearranged in order to better justify our recommendations in the education setting (see p. 11).

It is not clear what research method (data analytical method and/or technique) has been applied to achieve the goal, which is certainly broadly formulated. It is necessary to describe in more detail what was covered by the empirical research-based approach, and how it was implemented.

According to the reviewer’s comment, we deeply added methodological details for explaining whether a combination of quantitative and qualitative data would bring a “more comprehensive view of the process by which PE-PTs develop their teaching self-efficacy and competencies” (see subchapter 4.1, p. 9, lines 29-37). We also stressed the extent to which “the processing of qualitative data provided an additional rationale for explaining why Jigsaw participants displayed a greater level of pedagogical content knowledge, but no significant difference in the improvement of teaching self-efficacy in comparison with direct instruction participants” (see subchapter 4.1, p. 9, lines 37-40). More specifically, we noticed that “the self-confrontation interviews revealed that the asymmetric position in which PE-PST were placed during the expertise phase of Jigsaw mainly led them to judge their teaching competencies as insufficient in comparison with those of the instructor (Legrain et al., 2015)” (see subchapter 4.1, p. 9, lines 40-44).