Professional Learning:
Coaching, Mentoring & Networks

Part 1 - Maximising Staff Expertise for Digital Growth

Because teachers deeply value the opinions of their immediate colleagues, often the most impactful CPD is delivered by identifying within-school experts and giving them a platform to share their practice.

Whether through whole-school sessions, departmental workshops, or one-to-one mentoring, providing regular opportunities for staff to share what works is the key to embedding digital tools into daily teaching and learning.

Part 2 - Why "One-Size-Fits-All" Tech Training Fails

One-off, "one-size-fits-all" tech training sessions on an INSET day are historically ineffective. For digital tools to become truly embedded, professional development must be continuous, job-embedded, and heavily reliant on peer-to-peer collaboration. Teachers value the insights of other practitioners—especially those working within a similar context.

Leverage Early Adopters & Champions

Identify digitally confident educators across different departments or year groups to serve as "Cloud Champions" or "PedTech Leads".

Empower them to model effective practice and offer informal, low-stakes support to their peers.

If capacity allows, give them more professional development so they can always be one step further

Shift to a Coaching Model

Consider professional growth frameworks like 'Improving not Proving' initiative. Rather than grading teachers on a tech checklist, pair them with a coach to work toward an individualised pedagogical goal—such as using digital audio feedback to support editing skills.

Open the Classroom Doors

Create opportunities for structured learning walks within your school and look outward to the wider sector.

Organise study tours to pathfinding schools or engage with professional networks on platforms like LinkedIn to see how similar settings handle deployment.

Part 3 - How to balance the 'Non-Negotiables' with Subject Autonomy

To embed a whole-school digital strategy, senior leaders must balance non-negotiable platforms (like Teams for communication and OneNote for quality assurance) with local flexibility for subject leaders.

Rather than forcing tech onto departments that already get good results, win buy-in by using technology as a specific vehicle to solve their existing problems, such as using AI to tackle feedback workload.

Ultimately, senior leaders must grant middle leaders the autonomy to explore context-specific tools, backed by a safe culture where making mistakes is treated as a vital part of the learning process.

Key Questions

When conducting learning walks, are we focusing on tool features, or are we forensically observing how the technology is removing specific barriers for the learners?

How are we capturing and digitising our internal expertise (e.g., short screen recordings) so that new staff can onboard at the point of need?

How do you support staff to maximise the potential of the technology available?

'To get meaningful data is a really big challenge that faces schools. We all collect and store posts of data. However, turning that data into something that is useful and empowering to a teacher requires that data be brought together and presented in a way that enables teachers to make accurate judgments and assessments on what is right for a child. It's often called insights, giving the teacher insights into the pupil. And we're collecting those insights or providing those insights to teachers in a variety of ways.'

Jonathan Bishop
CEO - The Cornerstone Academy Trust

The role of mentoring, coaching and teaching

'They're subtly different. Coaching, mentoring, tutoring and actually, you need all three. And a good, skilled teacher, by nature, does all 3 in a class, though. It's pretty hard work. Bring the digital tools in, and you can start to bring the AI tools and the power of tech to bring those insights into who really takes away the labour-intensive parts for the teacher and frees them up to be what should be - a great teacher'