Crisis Management, School Leadership in Disruptive Times and the Recovery of Schools in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Systematic Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting, informative, and well written review. It is limited both by the publications that are available for the period under review and the authors' decision early on not to differentiate between the results of research on primary and research on secondary schools, and to ignore differences in the identification of 'more' and 'less' effective leadership at different levels. These are important limitations.

Author Response

Point 1

It is limited both by the publications that are available for the period under review

Response 1

389 records were identified through database searching; after screening (deleting duplicates, reviewing abstracts, and reading full-text papers),  42 eligible studies for the period 2019-2022 were identified under the PRISMA framework. 

Point 2

It is limited by the authors' decision early on not to differentiate between the results of research on primary and research on secondary schools, and to ignore differences in the identification of 'more' and 'less' effective leadership at different levels.

Response 2

One of our inclusion criteria was "Studies focusing on the description of school crisis leadership practices within primary and/or secondary general and special education". In Fig. 5.1 (profile of the reviewed studies), someone can observe that 23 out of 42 studies were conducted in the educational context of primary & secondary education, that's why we didn't differentiate the two categories of schools. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an excellent review paper. The authors are right to say that it is a timely work, they have honestly referred to similar recent works by others, identified the gap and developed a review to address it. The methodology followed in impeccable. I particularly comment the authors on the structure of the presentation that organizes the review in areas of interest, making it easier to focus on what one is looking for rather than getting lost in a sea of publications, as well as on the depth and quality of the discussion. When it comes to the core content of this manuscript, I have no concerns.

Some minor/side comments:

It is a pity that the list of relevant journals for which a more detailed manual check or articles was performed does not include MDPI's relevant journal, Trends in Higher Education, which also focuses on policy and leadership in education.

Please note that MDPI citation style is numbers in brackets, and references are sorted based on order of appearance instead of alphabetically, so some editing will be required. 

Figures 3.2 and 3.2 have  been copied from blogger.com and from an unpublished thesis. I did not manage to find any information regarding their sharing licenses; are the authors sure they have the right to publish these images without the release/consent from their rights holders? The rights to Figure 3.3 are clearly owned by SAGE, so that one certainly cannot be published without the publisher's permission.

Figure 4.1 is a bitmap of poor quality. A vector version would be more suitable for publication.

Figures 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 are also bitmaps. They are legible, but would  be even clearer in vector format.

Author Response

Comment 1

It is a pity that the list of relevant journals for which a more detailed manual check or articles was performed does not include MDPI's relevant journal, Trends in Higher Education, which also focuses on policy and leadership in education.

Response 1

Using key words such as "school crisis management", "crisis management" we didn't find any relevant article in "Trends in Higher Education"

Comment 2

Please note that MDPI citation style is numbers in brackets, and references are sorted based on order of appearance instead of alphabetically, so some editing will be required. 

Response 2

The editing has been done

Comment 3

Figures 3.2 and 3.2 have  been copied from blogger.com and from an unpublished thesis. I did not manage to find any information regarding their sharing licenses; are the authors sure they have the right to publish these images without the release/consent from their rights holders? The rights to Figure 3.3 are clearly owned by SAGE, so that one certainly cannot be published without the publisher's permission.

Response 3

Figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 have been removed from the text.

Comment 4

Figure 4.1 is a bitmap of poor quality. A vector version would be more suitable for publication. Figures 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 are also bitmaps. They are legible, but would  be even clearer in vector format.

Response 4

The diagrams have been converted to PNEG form and Figures 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 look clear now.