One of the means to support teachers and schools to achieve the goals of benchmarking best practices was to develop a common knowledge framework for analysing and presenting the reviews and enabling them to transfer and foster change. A framework "P2P: A model for examining a school" (Ilomäki & Lakkala, 2005) was created to support teachers and schools in their peer reviewing processes before the visits, in preparing them, and afterwards, in reflecting the experiences. This report applies the school review framework as an evaluation basis of the written reports. The framework represented also kinds of quality criteria for assessing the value of innovations, and in this sense, the outcomes of this report are implicitly also results of a quality assessment, made by the reviewing teachers and principals. The aim was also to support the essential collaborative reflection processes of teachers and schools, which are essential for individual and organisational learning but which are not ordinary practices of teachers (see e.g. Day, 1999; Hargreaves & Dawe, 1990).

This report describes the outcomes of the peer reviewing processes that were carried out by fourteen schools during the P2P project in 2004–2005. The focus of this report is on the content of the peering process and its outcomes: which features and 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 analysis is based on the reports written by the school teams.

The evaluation of organizing the peer reviewing processes during the P2P project is reported in McCormick (2006). As presented in his report, the peer reviewing process is closely connected to the goals of school improvement and teacher development. Peer reviewing can – if properly organised and conducted – be a process where a school and a teacher learn from others working in a similar situation.  McCormick made several objections concerning the P2P process from the organisational point of view. In the present report, we will investigate the P2P by evaluating the outcomes, the school examination reports. Many of the results and conclusions presented in the present report are more understandable when compared with the results and conclusions made by McCormick. For example, he discussed about the organisational structures of a school; such underlying structures have doubtlessly strongly shaped the content of the examination reports that were the data of the present study.

The aim of this report is 1) to give an analytical interpretation about what was reflected in the peer-to-peer examinations; and 2) give some suggestions about conducting the peer-to-peer reflection processes in future.

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