ABSTRACT
The national strategy for continuing professional development in the UK (see DfES, 2001a) strongly advocates the use of coaching, mentoring and peer-networking mechanisms to enhance teacher professional development and performance in schools. The same principles also apply within the college sector. It suggests that mutual support for learning, the dissemination of good practices, the translation of teacher learning to pupil learning and the embedding of desirable change are among the potential benefits to be realised from the adoption of such mechanisms (see DfES, 2001a, b, d; Harrison, 2001).
