Mediating effects of trust, communication, and collaboration on teacher professional learning in Hong Kong primary schools

Abstract

This study tests mediated principal leadership effects on teacher professional learning through collegial trust, communication and collaboration in Hong Kong primary schools. It is based on a series of single mediator studies, and uses the same convenience sample of 970 teachers from 32 local primary schools. It also adopts regression-based macros, integrated with bootstrapping, to examine and compare sizes and proportions of potential mediating effects of the three human relational variables. The findings affirm the role and nature trust, communication, and collaboration play in the mediated relationship. In contrast, the mediating power of collaboration is non-significantly stronger than that of communication, and is more than double that of trust. The conclusion is that a school environment featuring mutual trust, effective communication and genuine collaboration is a core condition for teacher learning and change. Provided that the forces that bind people together in schools are multiple, principals are recommended to create school culture and conditions strategically for teacher learning to thrive.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Rebecca Li and Bowie Liu for their assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to Hayes, an omnibus test is “used to answer the question as whether there is evidence that variable or variable(s) X exerts an effect on Y without specifying which variable in the set of X variables is responsible for the effect or, in the case of a multi-categorical X, the nature of the difference between group means that is responsible for that effect” (2013, p. 7).

2. In the bootstrapping output, if 0 is not included in the pairs of confidence intervals, the estimate is statistically significant, vice versa.