Peer consultation: 6 methods you can use today

The only one of the six that runs in parallel groups: everyone sits in a trio and all trios run the same step at the same time. One person puts a real question on the table, the two others ask clarifying questions, and then think out loud while the presenter turns their chair away and only listens.

Because the roles rotate after each case, everyone has had a turn within half an hour, and that is exactly what makes it the right first taste of peer consultation. Formally it is a Liberating Structure rather than a peer-consultation method, but it does the same thing in a quarter of the time.

Five steps, and one of them is the reason for the name: the presenter turns their chair away and the group talks about them in the third person, as if they were not there. Out loud, so they hear everything, but without being able to respond.

That sounds uncomfortable and the first time it is. The effect is that things get said which eye contact would have kept polite, and that the presenter can hear them without having to account for themselves. Pick this method when someone starts explaining how it really was the moment feedback arrives.

Seven steps around one moment: the presenter tells the case like a film, up to the point where the charge was, and stops there. Then every member of the group puts themselves into that moment out loud (in the first person) and answers the research question themselves.

The fourth and fifth steps make it different from the rest: everyone writes down in silence what they think it really comes down to, and then the group uses the four cardinal virtues to find which stance is wise here. So no advice, and no decision, but a shared understanding of what was at stake.

Seven steps in which the group listens not to the situation but to the beliefs underneath it: "a good teacher solves this alone", "if I keep asking I'm being difficult". Those get named, not judged, while the presenter takes notes.

After that the group puts alternative ideas next to them: not an action plan, but other ways of looking at it. Pick this method when someone keeps hitting the same wall in different situations: the problem is rarely in the situation then.

The most extensive of the six, and the only one with a real construction in it: the presenter describes an incident without telling how it ended. The group asks, analyses and works out alternatives of its own. Only in step six does everyone hear what actually happened.

That order is the whole point. Whoever knows the outcome judges it; whoever doesn't has to think. Eight steps and about forty minutes, so plan it as the entire subject of a meeting, not as an agenda item.

Seven steps, and in none of them does anyone give advice. The presenter brings a situation where they lead and own the decision, and says straight away what they would have to let go of. Then the group falls silent for two minutes, after which everyone in turn says not what they think of it, but what the story stirs in them: an image, a feeling, a gesture.

That mirroring is the heart of the method, and the reason it works so well in a team of teachers: nobody has to solve the case, so nobody rushes to rescue the presenter. Only then do group and presenter think further together, and the session ends with appreciation and two minutes of writing for yourself. Choose it when the question is about your own leadership: in class, in the team, with parents.