Critical Friends
The process of peer review has been with us for a long time in many professional fields: medical, legal, engineering, accounting, acting, military and aviation, etc. The concept of having a mentor or an apprenticeship goes back to the founding of the country and beyond into the old world. In the educational field, programs like the BTSA program (Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment) for new teachers provide some level of support for new teachers as they develop their practices in the first one or two years, but there is very little formal mentoring after that and not all new teachers receive BTSA or similar support systems.
The mentoring system has been in place for both new teachers and teachers with more experience who might need support in a given area such as organization or rigor, but that is situational and differs from the type of ongoing support to be gained by implementing a rigorous peer review system for teacher collaboration.
In 2009,