This paper is about images, symbols and metaphors of school development used by educational practitioners that take part in a peer review program with their school.

Mutual visits of school representatives - known as peer reviews - represent a sustainable instrument for school development. Peer reviews in this context can be defined as “a development-oriented evaluation of selected areas of quality in schools and teaching. It is primarily carried out by school administrators and teachers who do not belong to the school being evaluated” (Förschner 2013, 52 (translated by the authors)). Those visits where peers, as critical friends, take a well-intentioned look at each other's practices and provide inspiration, have so far been little researched. For example, the impact on school development and the direct ways and consequences of those visits are rarely captured or recorded in data.

School development is understood as the intentional development of individual schools, including organizational, personnel, and teaching development in equal measure and focusing on the learning progress of students. Schools are required to shape their own goals for school development based on internal and external evaluations and school-specific needs. The development of schools is thus defined as development of the “second-order” (Rolff 2013, 37) and they should strive to be learning schools that: (1) formulate their visions as guiding principles, (2) innovatively develop their infrastructure accordingly, (3) develop cooperation among staff, (4) organize teaching, and (5) select appropriate methods and tools for self-reflection and self-organization (Rolff 2013). To do this, schools need the capacity to “build up internal school processes and structures in a targeted and systematic manner so that school processes and the quality of teaching and learning are improved in the long term and, as a result, all students can successfully achieve their learning goals” (Maag Merki 2017, 269 (translated by the authors)). According to Maag Merki, school development capacity therefore includes organizational, interpersonal, and personal capacity. School development therefore also includes professional and leadership development. This school development capacity model is useful for analyzing school development processes in individual schools, as it focuses on the conditions that has to be in place for successful school development processes (e.g. Maag Merki et al. 2022).

The developments and unique histories of the schools in this study have all been shaped by peer reviews and professional learning communities. The effects, benefits, and consequences of the visits towards the individual school development have been a blind spot up to now, which we would like to shed light on by collecting and analyzing “learning stories”. These “learning stories” were the result of a collaborative two-day workshop involving school management teams and teachers from various schools. The participants are all members of the german school network “Blick über den Zaun”, which means they all regularly participate in peer reviews with their schools (e.g. Carl & Killus 2018). The school network “Blick über den Zaun“ is an association of schools oriented towards innovative education, which has been in existence since 1989 with the goal of supporting school development from the bottom up. The aim is to contribute to the direct exchange of experiences between schools through regular mutual peer reviews, conferences, and workshops, so they can learn from each other. The schools participating in the network are organized in working groups, which usually comprise 8-10 schools. These schools visit each other for 2-3 days at a time. As a rule, two of those peer reviews take place each year.

The analyzed data are from the project “Peer reviews as a tool for quality development in schools: current status and prospects”, funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung. This project intends to evaluate, present, and classify the results of existing and newly collected data on the concept of peer reviews. This will generate well-founded insights for the sustainable design of peer reviews for future transfer. The data collection took place in a two-day workshop setting with representatives from different schools. In conclusion eight picturesque “learning stories” from different schools were created and collected. The approach in this study can be defined as a qualitative art-based (e.g. Chilton & Leavy 2020, Pauwels & Mannay 2020, Hübner 2024) and participatory research (e.g. Unger 2014). The use of the “learning story” as a multimodal design tool in form of drawings and language integrates the possibility of using different forms of expression and is intended to promote greater participation. At the same time, the degree of abstraction in the illustrations places greater demands on participants to reflect on their experiences. After completion, the individual “learning stories” were presented and discussed in school teams. Methods of qualitative image content analysis differ greatly in their structure and approach depending on the individual cases and image form. In analyzing our image data, we borrowed and combined methods from visual rhetoric (e.g. Refaie 2003, Löffler 2014) and visual semiotics (e.g. van Leeuwen 2001, Jewitt and Oyama 2006, Rose 2023). Our approach can be summarized as follows: Concentrating first on a pre-iconographic description of the image with all visible elements. Secondly, focusing on an iconographic analysis and identification of the elements depicted within a specific context. Therefore, explaining symbols, metaphors, and allegories to pursue a visual metaphor analysis (Tinic 1997). And finally combining the results of the previous steps to decipher the overall message of the “learning stories”. Analyzing the rhetorical strategies used to achieve the desired effect on the viewer and convey one's own image of school development. In addition, the reflection of our own role as an observer and researcher is also part of the process. The picture analysis aims at exploring the shared, explicit and implicit knowledge structures underlying the designed images for school development.

First findings show that participants deliberately choose metaphors for their school development and that these metaphors complement or even duplicate each other. Without the requirement to work visually, all participants resorted to a combination of images and text elements with a strong focus on imagery. The metaphors chosen range from boats in the sea and on rivers, rockets taking off, apple trees bearing abundant fruit, to construction sites, fires, and patchwork quilts. At first glance, the stories reveal various initial situations that influence the school developments depicted. For example, boats can take different routes and find themselves in different waters, which implicitly reflects different understandings of school development and leadership. Challenges are sometimes like a flame and come from outside of the school, while other obstacles lie within schools and freeze processes of development for an indefinite period. The connection and intertwining of visual data rooted in implicit knowledge and the explicitly explained events in the school's learning history allows us to reconstruct a multi-perspective picture of the individual developments of the schools. Overall, the analysis of the learning stories suggests that successful school development is linked to the current challenges individual schools are facing: An understanding of leadership and the acceptance of the peer review process in schools are essential. The extent to which peer reviews can trigger and influence developments in individual schools depends on these areas and the unique starting point of each school. This case study illustrates the diverse approaches and behaviors of schools following peer reviews in various initial situations. The creation of “learning stories,” which are rich in symbolism and of great significance for the respective schools, also proved to be an effective reflection tool and at the same time provided data for the project.

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