Professional Development

Peer Enquiry As Leadership Development

Mark Hadfield and Mel Ainscow report on their involvement in a major initiative in Wales to harness the power of peer enquiry to transform leadership development and fuel school improvement .
Colleagues talking

Structured collaboration between schools

All school leaders learn from other schools about improving practice, whether directly or indirectly. This learning can range from the search for a particular ‘golden nugget’ of practice, that might move a school on to its next stage of development, to the sharing of experiences of implementing a centrally imposed reform.

More structured forms of collaborative school improvement may not be an appropriate strategy for all schools to adopt i, nor is their adoption in certain school systems likely to bring about widespread improvement ii.

There are, though, structured forms of collaboration between schools, because of their ability to build capacity at the individual, team and organisational level, that all schools and school leaders should consider investing in. One such approach is peer enquiry, by which we mean school leaders’ involvement in the cyclical, and reciprocal, exploration of lines of enquiry into practice across schools.

We have previously discussed iii the role of peer enquiry, once ‘layered over’ existing accountability structures, in helping school leaders develop more effective school-to-school working but here we want to focus on its potential to support leadership development.

Peer enquiry and the development of schools’ adaptive capacity

Peer enquiry across schools can take a range of forms and involve very different levels of collaboration between schools leaders and teachers. In this article we outline the approach promoted by one of four regional education consortia in Wales. The approach emerged within a system that was trying to develop a more school-led approach to school improvement and professional learning. During our work in Wales iv we, and others involved in more formal evaluationsv , began to realise its potential to support leaders in developing their schools’ ‘adaptive capacity’. We understood this to entail:

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