by Matt Newell, Co-Founer, IRISConnect 

As a school or college leader, you juggle many demands: raising standards, retaining great staff, building future leaders, and ensuring consistent high-quality teaching, all while managing tight resources and workload pressures.

Traditional one-size-fits-all professional development (PD) often falls short. Teachers frequently describe PD as too generic and disconnected from their classroom realities, with many reporting that it has limited impact on their practice (OECD TALIS, 2018). Research also shows that teachers who feel they lack agency over their development are less satisfied and more likely to consider leaving (NFER, 2020).

To retain talented educators and support their growth, PD needs to become deeply personal and rooted in the reality of a teacher’s classroom, rather than top-down.

The following simple but powerful three-step model can help you personalise PD in a way that empowers staff, supports retention, helps upskill future leaders, and strengthens school culture.

While schools and colleges are at different stages, this blog focuses on what it takes to embed personalised professional development at scale, drawing from real examples of how organisations have moved from intention to implementation.

1. Observing and reflecting on practice
Traditional lesson observations are typically high-stakes, one-off events that provoke anxiety and yield unreliable feedback (Coe et al., 2014). Instead, educators are finding that making observation teacher-led and grounded in authentic evidence transforms it into a valuable development tool.

The Langley Heritage Primary decided to choose video observations as a promising alternative. However, teachers initially felt nervous about recording their lessons, and it took a while to get this approach off the ground. But as video became a tool for self-reflection, owned and controlled by the teacher, it built trust and opened up more honest dialogue. Giving teachers the choice to record and review their lessons on their own terms made professional learning feel safer and more relevant.

Even when video is used to support reflection, reviewing lessons can be time consuming. Whether you're a teacher looking to improve a specific element of your practice or a coach supporting multiple staff members, sifting through recordings to pinpoint relevant moments can be a barrier. This is where AI can make a meaningful difference. Within minutes, it can analyse a lesson and highlight moments that align with a chosen development focus (such as questioning technique or behaviour strategy) allowing teachers and coaches to jump straight to the parts of the lesson that matter. This targeted feedback loop not only saves time but makes reflective practice more accessible and sustainable across a school.

To make observations more effective:

• Let teachers identify the focus of the observation
• Use video to revisit practice without relying on memory
• Connect observations to a simple framework or set of shared indicators
• Use AI to streamline the process and save your staff valuable time

This empowers teachers to reflect deeply and identify the areas they truly want to improve.

2. Demonstrating what ‘better’ looks like
Once teachers notice areas they want to improve, the next challenge is knowing what better looks like. This step is where motivation can fade, especially if examples are vague or feel disconnected from the classroom context.
At the Grove Road Community Primary School, leaders addressed this by curating real, contextualised examples of effective practice. Teachers are able to watch peers teach similar topics or year groups, helping them visualise strategies in action. When teachers can see what strong practice looks like in classrooms like their own, they feel more confident to try something new.

Other schools use resources like WalkThrus or IRIS Connect’s free technique library to break down complex practices into manageable chunks. These tangible resources help teachers see exactly what they can adapt, and why it works. Providing the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ makes change feel both credible and achievable.

3. Supporting the journey to get there
The final stage of helping teachers embed change is often where schools and colleges face the greatest challenge. High-quality coaching is time-intensive, and without structure, support can feel inconsistent or unsustainable across a trust or large school.

At Hales Valley Trust, leaders tackled this by embedding a structured coaching model that balanced personalisation with scalability. They began by training groups of staff across multiple schools to become skilled coaches and developed a clear framework that defined what progression looked like in key areas of teaching. Coaches and teachers now have access to flexible tools that help them focus development with a shared language and clear goals.

Importantly, much of this is hosted on a digital platform, enabling teachers to access resources and log progress asynchronously, which reduces pressure on meeting time and increases accessibility.

By growing coaching capacity and combining it with a well-designed, flexible structure and a streamlined digital platform, Hales Valley Trust created a sustainable model for supporting teacher growth at scale, without losing the personalisation that makes coaching powerful.

Conclusion
When PD starts with classroom reality, offers clear models of success, and includes structured support, it becomes a journey that teachers want to be on. Schools that personalise development in this way aren’t just improving teaching, they’re building a culture where teachers stay, thrive, and grow into the leaders of tomorrow. 

Next steps

• Start by exploring how teachers experience observation. Is it developmental, or does it feel performative? Consider offering video- and AI-supported reflection as a low-pressure, more effective alternative.
• Make ‘better practice’ visible. Curate or create contextualised examples of strong teaching for common development areas. Select and distribute quality-assured external resources as the standard within your school or trust or build your own libraries of good practice.
• Review your coaching model. Is it scalable, consistent, and personalised? Look at frameworks that offer structure without rigidity and consider using innovative technology to reduce the admin burden and make time for what really matters.

Andy Newell, Managing Director of IRIS Connect will be leading a webinar, Building Personalised PD at Scale: How emerging technology changes the game, on 12 November 2025. Find out more and book your place.