This study aims to examine the relationships among teachers' participation in professional development (PD), total weekly working hours, peer collaboration (PC), stakeholder feedback, and principal leadership (PL) across three non-Western contexts, namely Macau, Malaysia, and Brazil.
Using PISA 2022 teacher questionnaire data from 11,518 teachers in Macau, Malaysia, and Brazil, the study employed descriptive statistics and mediation analyses to examine how PL and teachers' total working hours were associated with participation in PD through peer collaboration and stakeholder feedback.
The mediation analyses showed that peer collaboration and stakeholder feedback significantly mediated the relationships between PL and teachers' total working hours and participation in PD across all three contexts. However, the mediation patterns differed across countries. Both mediators showed partial mediation in Macau and Brazil. In Malaysia, the relationship between PL and participation in PD was fully mediated by peer collaboration and stakeholder feedback, whereas the relationship between total working hours and participation in PD remained partially mediated. The indirect effects were statistically significant but small in magnitude, suggesting that collaboration and feedback function as modest relational mechanisms rather than strong predictors of PD participation.
The study is limited to three countries/economies and therefore has limited generalizability. Consequently, it should be acknowledged that the generalizability of the findings is limited to countries with high, average, and below-average performance in PISA.
The findings offer several practical implications for policymaking, school leadership, and PD design. The findings offer several important implications for policymakers, practitioners, and those designing PD programs. Although teachers spending too much time on lesson preparation or student assessments increases their learning impact on students, having too many working hours can create professional fatigue and reduce their motivation. Policymakers should consider strategies to optimize teachers' time use. Second, the study highlights the importance of structured teacher collaboration in fostering effective PL.
The study shows and emphasizes that PL has a very central role in teachers’ PD and PC. Effective leadership has direct and mediated effects on teachers’ PD engagement, particularly via facilitating stakeholder feedback and PC. Accordingly, there is a need for leadership development programs. Principals should be equipped to cultivate a school culture that prioritizes professional dialogue, shared learning, and continuous feedback. Finally, the different results across these three economies reveal the importance of context and local educational environments in PD strategies. For example, stakeholders' feedback mediates the relationship in Malaysia, but it serves as a partial mediator in Macau and Brazil. Therefore, national education systems must shape PD programs according to the contextual needs and local conditions.
This study offers a comparative empirical contribution by examining how leadership, workload, collaboration, feedback, and participation in PD are configured across three under-researched non-Western contexts. Rather than claiming theoretical novelty, the study shows that similar school- and teacher-level conditions are associated with participation in PD through different relational pathways in Macau, Malaysia, and Brazil.
