 On Mondays we have our professional learning and during that time teachers bring any writing that the children have done and part of that meeting was that we had to build our collective knowledge, we had to build our understanding of acceleration, understanding of what practices brought about acceleration and brought about success for our children. We bring along evidence of what we tried and then the impact of those practices. The role of the other people in the group is to listen and to learn. But then once that person's finished presenting we've got some questions that we can ask to support that teacher to think critically about their practice. It was really hard to begin with. We've got much more comfortable around having our peers challenge our practice and to ask us really tricky questions. And through that questioning it helps us to think, was that very good? That's had a small impact but is it enough of an impact? Collectively we were able to draw out what practices caused acceleration. Now this was really hard for us all to do at the beginning. I heard phrases such as, oh it's about spending extra time with that child. But the good thing was is because I was in classrooms working alongside teachers and we had leaders having observed in the classrooms that we were able to say, ah hang on, but this was when you gave some really specific feedback to that child didn't you? And that's when we saw the success here. So at the start it was about supporting and really drawing out for teachers the practices that caused acceleration and we got much better at it. Teachers were able to just talk about explicit practices. We had a whiteboard that was just full of writing of things that worked for our children here. So what's the role of oral language? And we were able then to generalise those practices and say, ah, so I wonder if that works also in maths. What about in reading? Ah, hey this child's not accelerating, what are you going to try here? What haven't you tried from our wall of acceleration? We wanted a collective space that we could have a record of our learning so that we could keep coming back and is this still relevant for us. So we've created this space here. When we feel like we've got a really good shared understanding of something, then we'll create a document. This is how things are done. But while we're understanding and grappling with these new things, we start with sticky notes and we keep coming back to it. There's a lot of discussion and a lot of questions because it isn't just about laminating something, sticking it up on the wall and saying, well that's that done. It's about ensuring that we do understand. So the ones that are not laminated are still things that are in the process of being understood and figuring out. The PLG time gives us that time to go and look at tried and true techniques. If one of the children is really struggling, teachers are often so busy with so many other things that being given that support to be able to say, you could go and look here for this or have you read this is beneficial for my professional development around writing and around what it should look like in the classroom. One of the things that were really effective was that once we'd drawn out what practices were effective in accelerating children, we were then able to collaboratively sit down together and plan that next week's learning for that child. That built a collective responsibility for our children that even though that child's in that teacher's class, I want to find out how did they go? How did they go again? And then the following Mondays meeting saying, hey, how did we do? We were going to try that. Did we achieve that? How did we go? What helped them to achieve that? What did you do? Or what did you need to change in order for that to work? So there the cycle starts again.