Reflections on coaching and mentoring in the transition to school space

ABSTRACT

The learning and development of educators in schools can take many forms. This paper is a critical reflection about the coaching and mentoring practices of the authors, set within the context of a state-wide transition to school initiative in Queensland, Australia. The paper describes the context of the initiative, the role of the authors, critical participatory action research methodology adopted, some of the tasks used, and emerging evidence of the efficacy or otherwise of decisions made. Critical reflection on the processes undertaken, and the rationale for these, have formed the basis for planning coaching and mentoring support through the initiative and constitute the data utilised in this paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Transition to school
• professional learning
• coaching and mentoring
• critical participatory action research
• site-based ontology

Introduction

Coaching and mentoring

There is a vast amount of quality literature around coaching and mentoring generally (Kapoutzis et al. 2024) and of teachers in particular (Hobson and van Nieuwerburgh 2022), and it is beyond the scope of this paper to canvass that literature in detail. Even to elicit distinct definitions of coaching and mentoring from the literature is difficult. While Viera (2021, 13) cites Whitworth et al.’s (2007) definition of coaching as ‘an ongoing professional relationship that helps people produce extraordinary results in their lives, careers, businesses, or organizations‘, he also notes that ‘similar descriptions may also refer to mentoring’. Coaching is sometimes seen as task-oriented, specifically aiming to improve certain aspects of individual performance (Gormley and van Nieuwerburgh 2014; Viera 2021) while mentoring is a ‘formalised process, whereby a more knowledgeable and experienced person actuates a supportive role of overseeing, encouraging reflection, and learning within a less experienced and knowledgeable person, to facilitate that person’s career and development’ (Roberts (2000) cited in Ståhle and Stålbrandt 2022, 56). Both coaching and mentoring comprise the assistance of knowledgeable, experienced people in challenging, advising, and nurturing groups and/or individuals about situations in their own professional domains (Association of Independent Schools of NSW (AISNSW) 2024). In this paper, we do not make further distinction between coaching and mentoring, instead, with Hobson and van Nieuwerburgh (2022, 5), we note ‘that both coaching and mentoring can be used to enhance educational leadership, professional practice of educators and affiliated staff, student success and well-being, and relationships between educational institutions and their communities’. In this light, we use the terms mentor, mentee, and mentoring in the remainder of this paper, noting that it is a process that establishes a mutual learning process which is collegial, trusting, mutually respectful, bidirectional, reflective, and generative, where the mentor and the mentee are co-researchers (AISNSW 2024).

There is sometimes an assumption that the mentor needs to be more experienced and knowledgeable than the mentee. While this may be the case in certain aspects of the relationship, it is likely that a mentor who is external to a context (as is the case for the work described in this paper) will have less experience and knowledge about many aspects of the situation than the mentee (Ståhle and Stålbrandt 2022). Just as mentees are asked to reflect on their practice, ‘mentors must continuously interrogate their practice by questioning, discussing, listening, and studying their data’ (Linton and Grant 2020, 253). This paper is the result of such interrogation.

Context

Over the last 15 years, the Queensland Department of Education (DoE) has implemented several initiatives promoting effective transitions into the first year of primary school (designated Prep) for all children in Queensland. For many of these initiatives, various of the authors have played active roles as planners, implementers, coaches, mentors, and evaluators. In all of these programs, professional learning has been a major component. This paper describes and discusses the roles of the authors as mentors in one of these long-running transition to school initiatives. The major contribution of this paper is the focus on the role and rationale of the mentoring team, rather than the outcomes for those receiving the mentoring. As such, it provides an opportunity for critical reflection on the team’s role as interlocutor in promoting critical participatory action research among participants. Even though Queensland provides a particular cultural context for this study, the international respect in which mentoring is held in early childhood education, and the generalisability of the theoretical and practical aspects of our work in the transition to school space results in much wider applicability.

The DoE implemented Step up into Education from 2021 to 2024 in seven Spotlight primary schools, each receiving funding to:

… assist schools to work with transition research partners to evaluate and modify their existing transition programs to:

• build collaborative partnerships with Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) service providers, educators, children and families

• demonstrate evidence-informed, best practice approaches to transitions and early years curriculum and pedagogy, as identified in current research and literature

• determine strategies and initiatives to meet the needs of children and families(DoE 2021).

A key component of the support for the schools involved in Step up into Education 2021–2024 and their community partners was the provision of ongoing mentoring services across the 4 years of the initiative, focussed on transition to Prep. This component was offered as an open tender, with the authors engaged to deliver the required support.

Among other aspects, the Peridot Education team were contracted to provide, over the 4 years of the initiative:

• ongoing mentoring to seven Spotlight schools and central office staff to build their capability in planning, implementing, and evaluating effective transitions to school.

This paper chronicles how we planned to do that, based on the theoretical framework of critical participatory action research and site-based approaches; open, extensive and ongoing communication protocols and practices; principles of effective mentoring; and continuous reflection within the team. It provides an opportunity for critical reflection on the role and rationale of the Peridot Education approach, with the aim of guiding ongoing involvement in like initiatives.

Rationale for the approach adopted by the Peridot Education team

Considering the transformative aims of the Step up into Education 2021–2024 program and the localised place-based approach informing the cycles of inquiry developed by participating schools, the Peridot Education team adopted Critical Participatory Action Research [CPAR] (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2014) as a methodology for our approach to the mentoring component of the program. Informed by critical theory, (Habermas 1984, 1987), practice theory (Kemmis et al. 2014), and Schatzki’s (2002) notion of site ontology, CPAR provides principles for participation that complement the aims of the initiative.

There are three principles particularly relevant to the mentoring approach undertaken. First and foremost, CPAR (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2014) is educational. Participants commit to improving practice and their understandings of practice to articulate an educational rationale for a particular practice. Improving education relies on the capacity of practitioners to recognise and, if need be, contest institutionalised discourses, actions, and relationships. One of the key elements of the Step up into Education initiative required participants to reflect on and evaluate existing transition to school programs. Challenging discourses associated with this process included a ‘scan and assess’ phase to identify a focus for the inquiry cycle. This process was supported by the Peridot Education team who, in their role as mentors to the site-based teams, acted as interlocutors, encouraging and, if required, leading conversations about the inclusivity and rationality of the proposed inquiry.

The second principle is that CPAR is situational: it acknowledges that conditions or arrangements found at or brought to a site influence and frame possibilities for practices (Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008). As such, a site ontological perspective of practices (Schatzki 2002) is based on the premise that they are inherently social and situated. Thus, to understand an organisational site such as a school and/or ECEC service, it is necessary to examine the practices (and arrangements that hold them in place) in all their concreteness in the specific sites in which they unfold (Boyle and Wilkinson 2018). This standpoint recognises that a ‘one size fits all’ approach is unlikely to achieve the articulated aims of the Step up into Education initiative across and within the vastly different sites occupied by the participating schools in a state as large and diverse as Queensland. It also recognises that sites vary in many ways as each place ‘is differently ‘practised’ into complete realisation’ (Reid 2017, 94).

CPAR is emancipatory. Drawing on Habermas’ (1984, 1987) theory of communicative action, this principle highlights the way participation in a communicative space can be used to change practices (actions) and establish understandings of practices and the conditions in which they are enacted. As such, it captures the reflexive-dialogic component of the approach which is underpinned by the premise that dialectic thinking can be used to critique the past in light of realities of the present and to acknowledge the role the past plays in the formation of the present.

Role of the Peridot Education team

The mentoring input from the team has taken several forms over the 4 years of the initiative, including webinars, workshops, teleconferences, and one site visit each semester. While group interactions around webinars and workshops have been a valuable means of sharing information, the more personal, regular communication processes with school-based transition teams have been of particular importance in maintaining active involvement in the initiative.

Making regular visits to the seven sites has enabled us to spend time with school teams and other stakeholders, and afforded opportunities to understand better the site-specific conditions enabling and constraining transition practices. Each of the site visits occurred over a full day, with the schedule and participants decided by the school transition team. In preparation for the visit, school teams were encouraged to consider their inquiry focus, actions to date, and future plans. As well, there was encouragement for the schools to engage in some specific tasks that provided the basis for further critical reflection.

The visits have also been key to building relational trust with school teams and their communities through recognition that there are many participants involved in the transition to school; affirmation of the willingness of participants to continue active engagement in the initiative; acknowledgement of the competence of different participants; and demonstrations of perceived integrity, evidenced by synergies between words and actions (Bryk and Schneider 2002). Building collaborative partnerships is conditional on the capacity of those involved to establish relational trust, described by Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer (2021, 264) as ‘the glue that binds together a professional learning community’. Over time, the school visits have emerged as a significant enabling factor to the provision of bespoke support for participating schools, and key to building collaborative relationships that support critical reflection.

In reflecting on the mentoring processes employed to date, we draw upon our experiences of site visits, communication with the school transition teams, and commentary across the schools about their engagement in the initiative. The aim is to reflect critically on our practice, just as we ask participants in the initiative to reflect critically on their practice. All data generated for this paper result from our reflections on the processes adopted for stimulating professional learning about transition to school during the initiative. Interpretive and reflexive analyses of these data facilitated interrogation of practices within site ontological, mentoring, and CPAR principles. These principles are illustrated in this paper through descriptions of several tasks utilised with transition teams.

In different combinations, two Peridot Education team members have worked with individual schools throughout the program. Their regular interactions with school teams have generated observations, field notes, reports of meetings, and facilitated the sharing of various forms of documentation. Following interactions with schools, all Peridot Education team members have engaged in de-briefings and reflexive conversations which have provided contexts for both reporting the journeys of the school teams and thinking critically about what has been enacted, observed, and/or assumed. These conversations provide the data for interrogation of the practices of the Peridot Education team.

Ethical considerations in the project

The practice of the Peridot Education team reflected the guidelines in the EECERA Ethical Code for Early Childhood Researchers (EECERA 2015) including voluntary and informed participation; anonymity and confidentiality; non-discriminatory and inclusive participation; non-malevolence; feedback; high standards of integrity, rigour and competence; and participatory approaches. At the school level we ensured that each site transition team was informed that any input they offered to any of the tasks tendered by the Peridot Education team was confidential and would not be shared with anyone else in a way which would identify individuals or sites. We set tasks, offered readings, and provided other input, but it was the site transition teams, and the individuals within them, who determined if, and how, they would participate. While many did, not everyone participated or participated in the same way; some requested further tasks as they saw the value of them to their own practice. The transition teams at each site were determined by the site participants; the agenda for, and duration of, each face-to-face site visit was determined by the relevant site transition team; as was the documentation to be shared by each transition team. At a Departmental level, we were responsible for reporting outcomes of each stage of the project. This was evidenced as a written report and an on-site meeting with senior DoE staff. Safeguarding the confidentiality of the school teams whilst providing a rigorous account of outcomes against the stage criteria meant that we needed to navigate the ethical tensions arising from the unequal power relationship between the site teams and the DoE as their regulatory and funding authority. For example, we provided general overviews of interaction with site teams, rather than sharing specific data generated through tasks and discussions. At our level, we were deliberate in our intent to ensure our approach was inclusive, rigorous, and non-hierarchical. Collaborative planning with all stakeholders, along with extensive routine critical reflection on our own practices, meant that the ethical considerations of the project and associated interactions were paramount.

Mentoring focus

CPAR involves ‘people who share a felt concern about their practices engag[ing] in a critical analysis of their practices (sayings, doing, relatings) and the conditions that prefigure their practices (practice architectures: arrangements that enable or constrain their practices)’ (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2019, 179). This expectation can present a challenge as those who are involved in the practices to be examined are simultaneously asked to examine those practices with a critical focus.

The mentoring role of our team has been to support critical reflection among the school-based teams by prompting and maintaining this communicative space as participants examine ‘the way we do things around here’ (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2019, 180). In these spaces participants gather to reflect on and critique ‘the character, conduct and consequences of their practices’ (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2014, 16). Our role as interlocutors involves using language within the particular semantic space of transition to school to explore, discuss, interpret, and seek explanations of particular practices, their use and impact. This role positions us as participants in the space, rather than as experts about transition in each context. It opens up possibilities for discussion and reflection, rather than suggesting we can offer solutions to challenges or direct teams to enact transition practices in particular ways. Acting as interlocutors, we have aimed to prompt and actively encourage reflexive-dialogic processes. To illustrate this role, we share some of the tasks designed to assist reflexivity in the next section of the paper.

Selected tasks

Mapping networks

One of the aims of Step Up into Education was to promote transition collaboration among schools and early childhood settings, as well as other relevant groups in communities. At the initial face-to-face meeting, we invited each of the school transition teams to describe their network of transition connections using a mapping task. Provided with a blank sheet of paper, participants were encouraged to draw free-style, self-generated maps (Hollstein, Töpfer, and Pfeffer 2020; Reyes 2016). As in other studies (Dobbie, Reith, and McConville 2018) there was a need to provide ongoing assurance and guidance as participants completed the task and the ensuing discussions which focussed on the extent, nature, and strength or reciprocity of connections (indicated by arrows, dotted or strong lines), generating critical reflection on current connections, the reasons for these, as well as other, potential connections.

The visual data provided by the maps served several purposes, including:

• providing some baseline data for future comparison with later mapping tasks;

• demonstrating a new form of qualitative data;

• stimulating reflexive dialogue;

• reflecting personal perceptions and experiences and highlighting the differences among these, even within one group; and

• helping to inform planning for transition as people considered the number and nature of connections.

The decision to utilise free-style maps as the initial task recognised that we and school transition teams had not previously met in person. While some rapport had been built though on-line presentations and teleconferences, an informal task was considered the most likely to help create the communicative space that is at the core of CPAR.

A further iteration of this task later in the initiative utilised a more structured approach to mapping connections related to transition. This approach combined providing a network diagram and asking educators to add details to the diagram based on a series of prompt questions.

Participants were asked to position themselves at the centre, and to locate each of their transition contacts somewhere on the diagram, listing them as very close contacts, close contacts, or acquaintances (Antonucci, 1986). The structure of this mapping task was focused, yet remained open-ended as each participant considered their own connections.

The diagrams produced in successive iterations of this task provide tangible resources for teams to reflect critically on their transition connections over time: ‘the way we do things around here’ (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2019, 180). The diagrams constitute various forms of sociograms that are also data in their own right (Dobbie, Reith, and McConville 2018). While sociograms may be considered static representations of what are often dynamic relationships, analysis of the diagrams over the four years of the project, combined with the reflexive dialogue around these, facilitated critical review of both intended and unintended changes.

Data analysis

One of the focus areas for Step Up into Education is the development of an evidence base in each site to support decisions about transition practices. Such development requires a focus on generating, analysing, and interpreting data, as well as responding to conclusions drawn from these processes. Conversations with educators emphasised their comfort with generating particular sorts of data – often quantitative assessment and reporting data. However, overall, there was a lack of confidence among the transition teams in generating and analysing qualitative data.

The following task was introduced to explore thematic analysis. It is based on Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six step approach to thematic analysis and Kellett’s (2016) use of chocolates as data.

The transition team in each location was provided with large boxes of individually wrapped, commercially available chocolates and invited to become familiar with these data. Taking turns, team members were invited to group the chocolates in different ways, explaining the basis for their grouping. Early grouping based on personal likes and/or dislikes emphasised the potentially subjective nature of coding. Further grouping used criteria related to size, shape, colour, as well as characteristics of the individual chocolates and/or the wrapping. Grouping the data was repeated multiple times, emphasising the multiple ways of coding these data according to different criteria.

When different coding strategies had been exhausted, the group was asked to agree on a set of criteria for grouping the chocolates and to document these criteria. The next step was to combine related groups into themes, name these themes and share examples of different themes. They were also asked to identify any chocolates that did not belong to a group, as well as chocolates that could belong to more than one group. Following this, educators reflected on using the same strategies to assist in analysis of their own qualitative data such as comments from children and/or families related to transition experiences.

Walking tours

Walking tours led by children can offer insights into their daily lived experiences. Tours can be complemented by photographs or videorecording, as well as conversations (Dockett, Einarsdóttir, and Perry 2017). Clark (2017) links the notion of tours to transect walks, used to gain detailed information about a particular context from the people who live there.

As a strategy encouraging educators to consider different perspectives of the school environment, we asked each school team to undertake a walking tour of the school with children in their first year of school. The guiding question was What do new children need to know about this school? Several transition teams undertook this task, with varying levels of adult control. In most instances, educators recorded the tour on their phone, taking direction from the children involved. For all the school teams, this was the first attempt to access children’s perspectives in this way.

To prompt further consideration of different perspectives of the school environment, educators were encouraged to invite parents on a walking tour similar to that undertaken by children, guided by the question, What do new families need to know about this school? When this was not possible due to COVID-related changes to school routines, educators could adopt the role of a parent new to the school and undertake their own tour.

The walking tour tasks provided opportunities for educators to reflect critically on different perspectives of the school environment. Efforts to consider the school environment with unfamiliar eyes, including physical accessibility and ease of navigation, supported reflection about the impact of these aspects on the sense of belonging experienced by families and children.

Discussion

Describing the rationale and role our team has adopted across the initiative provides opportunities to reflect on the ways in which we have supported, encouraged, and challenged participants as they articulated their practices, explored their transition approaches, and undertook actions to improve their transition programs. Our approach sought to recognise the capacity of educators to engage critically and to build their professional competence as they question ‘the ways of doing things around here’ (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2019, 180). As we are neither school staff nor responsible for the accountability of the initiative, our presence, with its associated challenges and provocations, has prompted ‘thinking outside the box’, as school teams contest discourses, actions, and relationships. The walking tour task is one example that highlights the competence of young children, through their guidance of the routes of the tours and the commentary around the importance of aspects of their school environments. Such evidence has prompted educators to re-think ways in which children could be involved in transition programs. Documentation of tours and the sharing of this information with different audiences – including the children and/or adults involved – has challenged taken-for-granted notions of children’s competence, as well as their participation rights, raising both ethical and practical issues for critique. In a similar way, the data analysis task stimulated discussions about what constituted data, how data are generated, and the ways in which qualitative data could be used to evaluate transitions practices. These examples highlight the educational principles of CPAR and the importance of our role as provocateurs as we sought to prompt critical reflection among transition team members.

Underpinning our engagement as coaches and mentors is a commitment to the situated nature of practice. This requires us to spend time getting to know people and places and what it is like to experience transition at this time in this place (Dockett and Perry 2021). Conditions at each site influence and frame possibilities for practice. The task of mapping networks invited educators to consider who was involved in transition practices as well as the nature of involvement. It made visible those who were included as well as those who were not and stimulated reflexive dialogue about why this might be so. Over time, transition teams identified some strong and reciprocal connections, intermittent connections, and some non-existent connections. Exploring this in more detail revealed how some practices and some connections can be entrenched with the rationale that we’ve always done it that way. Re-examining potential constraints helped to identify whether they were perceived or actual, as well as strategies to address these.

The emancipatory principle of CPAR has facilitated focus on the ways reflexive dialogue can prompt changes in practice. Creating an intersubjective space based on relational trust opens possibilities for communicative action where, in a safe environment, educators can reflect on practices and explore possibilities for change. For example, walking tours provide both the physical experience of exploring a site with opportunities for reflexive dialogue. While educators are familiar with the layout and context of schools, this is not necessarily the case for parents and children who have had limited experience of modern Australian schools. The unfamiliarity of environments can be exacerbated when English is not the home language. Walking with others, or even walking while seeking to access the perspectives of others, can challenge assumptions about family and child engagement with both the physical and educational spaces of school and help to re-frame the expectations of educators.

To report that all our interactions in the initiative have had enduringly positive outcomes would be to ignore the messiness of action research (Boyle et al. 2022), the realities of life in schools, and the complex processes of change as educators combine their commitments to improve transition processes and practices with their everyday professional lives. It would also run counter to the purpose of the paper which was to highlight the processes and thinking involved in the mentoring we provided. CPAR is a praxis-orientated professional learning practice. It requires a shift in thinking about professional learning from a technical ‘means to end’ approach to a more complex, risky, and open-ended approach. This form of inquiry acknowledges and celebrates the role uncomfortable truths (Boyle et al. 2022) play in the facilitation of new practices and understandings.

Acknowledging the realities of life in schools requires us to realise that there are many and varied demands on educators. Changes in staff, student enrolments, the availability of staff to back-fill absences, the ongoing impact of COVID, and changing community contexts all contribute to the complexities of work in schools. While school teams continued to be welcoming and happy to have us visit, there have been times when they have not had the capacity to engage in the planned tasks. In some instances, staffing challenges have contributed to limited availability among early childhood educators who are part of the site transition team. In others, absences have made it difficult for educators to engage in tasks. Despite these challenges, school transition teams have welcomed us into their contexts, shared their experiences and perspectives, and engaged in reflexive, often challenging dialogue.

Perhaps the key question for us to ask as we reflect on our role as mentors relates to change: how do we know that our involvement has generated changes in practice and changes in thinking around transition? Given the many influences on school communities and contexts, we cannot claim to have definitive evidence that the initiative and we alone are responsible for changes in transitions practice. However, compared with initial discussions, we note increased consideration of different perspectives around transition, with particular emphasis on the perspectives of families and children, as well as those of educators and community members beyond the school setting. We have also observed how efforts to engage with the perspectives of families have generated some innovative, respectful strategies. These have included changing enrolment interviews to informal conversations, meeting families in places where they feel comfortable, and hosting community expos, where families have opportunities to access a wide range of information and support. Efforts to engage children’s perspectives have included the tours described earlier, conversations, drawing activities, reciprocal visits to early childhood settings, and the preparation of child-directed social stories about school. In several sites, early childhood educators have become integral partners in transition teams.

Compared with initial interactions, there also has been a noticeable change in the ways in which evidence about transition practices has been generated, analysed, and used to inform change. While school educators are used to generating and reporting data, some had not yet considered the broader range of qualitative data to which they had access, ways to analyse these, and strategies to utilise these as evidence for, or of change.

Conclusion

Engaging in a sustained period of critical reflection is not necessarily an easy task. The Step Up into Education initiative required commitment to the cyclical process of inquiry, often the generation and analysis of data from sources that had not previously been considered, sharing personal and critical reflections, and engaging in the sorts of communicative action that prompts changes in practice. While the initiative sought to transform transitions practices, in doing so, it also sought to transform educators into critically reflexive practitioners. The educators involved were at various points along this path. Regardless of where they are, the process of transformation (Cowan, 1991) requires both internal change as the educator changes the ways in which they understand themselves and the world around them – including their ability to influence and change this – and external change as others regard them in a changed light, perhaps as evidenced by changed roles and expectations. One of our challenges has been to encourage, as well as to recognise these changes. To achieve this, we also need to be critically reflexive about our role, recognising that the participants have changed professionally as the initiative has progressed and reflecting those changes in our interactions and expectations.

This reflective study on mentoring processes has implications for future professional learning practices for transition and other teams in early childhood education. Firstly, we note the importance of teams like ours being given, and taking, time to be reflexive on their own practice. Often, in the business of implementing professional learning opportunities, getting the job done is the imperative. However, adherence to site ontological and CPAR principles means that reflexiveness, not only efficiency, is of the essence. Each of the CPAR principles has implications for future endeavours. All the members of the Peridot Education team are known as established scholars and practitioners in the transition to school space. Transition teams at each site were keen to know what we thought about what they were doing and planning and, sometimes, just wanted to be told what to do by the experts. While wanting our presence in each of the sites, to be educational, we also wanted it to be emancipatory so that the transition teams felt that they could make their own way about ‘the ways of doing things around here’ (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2019, 180). This challenged some expected notions of professional learning, as we positioned ourselves as interlocutors, rather than transmitters of knowledge. The face-to-face visits to sites not only helped provide time and space for reflection and discussion, but also allowed us to get to know about each site and to establish their local credibility among the practitioners. These visits seem to us to be critical aspects of the overall approach for future initiatives. An approach based on the principles we have adopted takes time, indicating that future implementation of professional learning programs utilising mentoring are not short term, and will require time and other resources.

Our mentoring role within Step Up into Education has important implications for practice within early childhood education, particularly, but not exclusively, in the transition to school space. While the tasks may be relevant across contexts, it is the processes surrounding these that support critical reflection as site-based teams develop, implement, evaluate, and reflect on their practices. The approach to professional learning, based on CPAR, with its educational, situational, and emancipatory foci, has wide applicability, as does the importance of reflexivity among the mentoring team. While this paper concerns an initiative which occurred in one state of one country, the principles used, evaluated, and reported have wide-ranging pertinence in professional learning and the development of site-based initiatives.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge that the work reported in this paper was supported by the Queensland Department of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).