What are the mentors ’ views of the effectiveness of this model of professional development, its sustainability and its potential to be scaled up?

The project itself was viewed very positively ("fab") by the mentor in School A who warned that "the timeframe is tight". The difficulty of timetabling a meeting time for all 3 year 5 teachers to meet to discuss planning for the project was referred to and the difficulty of timetabling specific lessons for ‘doing dialogic teaching’ was raised. The mentor in School A felt strongly that the teachers needed longer to work with this approach to see results - "the teachers could’ve got more out of the project if we could have done it over a year" but also commented that she felt the teachers had been empowered by the theory. The mentor’s view was that this programme would be easier to roll out without rigidly adhering to 2 week cycles. The strength of the project in terms of professional development was seen as the potential of the review sessions as a space and time to reflect. The mentor explained that having 3 teachers in the 45-minute review sessions meant that they had only 15 minutes to talk and she felt this wasn’t enough. In her words "potentials have been lost because of time constraints". The mentor would have preferred to have been given a programme structure with the freedom to adapt to fit the school and a longer timeframe to embed.

In terms of scaling up, the mentor felt that currently there was not a great deal of interest from teachers in other year groups, largely because it is a large school with over 100 staff and they tend to focus on their own area. However, she felt that none of the staff would argue with the principles and that in time it would have "naturally disseminated". To supplement the success in dialogic teaching in year 5, the mentor in this school anticipated ‘rolling out’ training and techniques across the school, probably one

year at a time. One comment made by the teacher in this school ("Ofsted threw us for 3 weeks") suggested that the programme, particularly in its implementation phase, can fall prey to other institutional priorities.

The mentor in School B felt that there was an unrealistic expectation in terms of the amount of suggested extra reading the teachers and mentors could do. She also explained that frequently she was directing the teachers to, for example, the 9 different styles of talk, rather than the teachers bringing this up as part of their reflection and review: "They’re busy class teachers and I have to accept that." The issue of teachers not being with their class was raised and there was a perception that teachers could be away from teaching too much: "the classes need the teacher to be teaching". This raises significant questions for the training and ongoing development that the programme demands in school where teachers are expected to be with their classes as much as possible.

In terms of scaling up the project, the mentor explained how two NQTs had overheard discussion about the project and as a result observed one of the teachers and had shown interest in the laminated ‘talk moves’ sheet. The intention in the school is for the Year 5 teachers to roll it out to Year 4 and as pupils go up to Year 6 they will continue to practise this approach.

The mentor mentioned "taking out the good stuff" several times without expanding on what this might be, as if the programme itself was too dense: "I would probably just take from it the really good stuff and know that you can change the timings slightly to what suits." The question sheets were seen as particularly useful and the mentor intended rolling these out to the wider staff: "The laminated question sheets are the best bit. We will be encouraging all the staff to use them after the project." The most positive result from this mentor’s point of view has been the opportunity to video and review teaching. Furthermore, the class teacher sharing the video with the students "to show children what they’re doing" was also seen as a positive.

The mentor in School C provided documentary evidence of the progress made in integrating the dialogic teaching approach with classroom objectives, schemes of work and professional development. These documents detail the careful, staged progression of dialogic teaching activities in the school. School C teachers had evidently benefitted greatly, as attested by the mentor and the teachers, from focussing on discussions of videos of their classes with their mentors. Having the opportunity to both discuss the implementation of dialogic teaching strategies, with evidence from the video, and planning for succeeding lessons was mentioned on a number of occasions as being central to maintaining the momentum of the project and as being of significant value to the teachers and the school. This mentor was confident that the principles and lessons learnt from the project could be cascaded through the school, but recognised that this might take some time. As with school B, the mentor and the teacher commented on the inherent value of reviewing the video lesson had for professional development generally and for this project in particular.