Peer learning is a “means of spreading innovation and sharing good practice between professionals, a non-judgemental mutual learning experience,” states the report, but how is this implemented in schools with no or little experience of visiting schools in another country and peer learning processes?

The visits aimed to highlight best practices in schools, showcase new ideas to help understand how today’s schools innovate, use ICT and integrate new educational objectives. The report illustrates the elements the school teams (teachers and principals) examined from the visited schools, what they found important or interesting, and what kind of ideas they obtained. The University of Helsinki has provided schools with a model for observation which consisted of six key elements including: the goals of the school, leadership, pedagogical practices or the ICT resources (full list in the report).

Among the key findings from the analyses of the school peer review reports by Minna Lakkala and Liisa Ilomäki of the University of Helsinki is that most school reports focussed on concerns about ICT resources. The reports, writes the Finnish national coordinator, “revealed the still-existing problems of technical infrastructure in many schools: lack of computers, the lack of good practices for supporting their use etc.”
The writers mention that from the analysis of the school examinations report, it was difficult to obtain deeper reflections on elements leading to more profound school development. The authors also suggest developing tools for more systematic peer reviewing and possibly incorporate it into the general teaching practice: “by using several tools and ways for peer reviewing, the reflection process could be a part of practitioners’ ordinary work, not a special case conducted […] during a separate project”.

A second finding is that peer learning still struggles to be a two-way process. There were very few issues mentioned in the section: “Ideas and practices you are willing to implement in your own school”. However, write the authors, this did not mean that teachers and principals did not learn anything from the visit to another school. As one of the Finnish teachers said in a discussion during the P2P project, “it is rather difficult to identify all the notions and ideas that have been received from the visit; the actual benefit of the peer reviewing is realised only gradually through time in the practical schoolwork”.

Bob McCormick of the Open University in the UK reported on the whole process. He writes that the P2P project had hoped to develop from the school visits’ experience to help schools to learn from each other across Europe. However “the resources to train a large group of principals and teachers, who are not accustomed to visiting schools and writing reports, were beyond the resources and skills of the project”.

To achieve the best results during the school visits a matching between schools before the visits was put into place with varying fortunes. The report also points out that the use of the eTwinning project’s matching features would have been a useful addition to the project: “it might be that the eTwinning project, with its web-based brokering system to arrange pairings of schools with matching interests, can provide some models where the schools have the ultimate control”.

The visits lasted three days during which the school leader, one or two teachers and other school personnel visited the schools. In France, Northern Ireland and Finland, a pedagogical adviser supported the schools in their visits and assisted in the report writing process.

Visits were organised, as Bob McCormick explains, as a ‘reflective walkthrough’, seen as an organised tour through a school’s learning areas to provide feedback on teaching and learning in a particular areas of focus. More importantly, “it is not seen as an evaluation,” he writes.

The process involved a team visiting a school, spending 5-10 minutes in each of several classrooms, looking at student work and talking with students and their teachers. The need to see the teaching and learning through the eyes and voices of students is a central feature.

The report gives a useful insight into the school visits reports and analyses how the peer review activities took place between the schools. It is a crucial tool for policy-makers, decision-makers and practitioners in general who wish to engage into peer visits.

The P2P project was led by European Schoolnet with eight partners and lasted from 2004 to April 2006.  It focused on a selected number of countries, each with differing school systems: The Netherlands, France, Finland and Northern Ireland.

P2P stands for Peer Reviews and Observatory on Policy and Practice in ICT and was partly funded by the European Commission eLearning Programme.

The guiding principle in P2P project was to aggregate and expand existing activities related to identifying and transferring excellence in the policy and practice of e-learning in school systems at regional, national and European level. The project aimed both to monitor and stimulate the construction of change in ICT policies and practice at these levels.

More information on the school visits of the P2P school practice strand is available on the Insight portal (http://insight.eun.org) and the P2P specific project site at (http://p2p.eun.org), where all schools are presented in a school gallery.

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