"It Wouldn't Work With My Pupils": Why Your Own Classrooms Make the Best Training Material

Last updated on: 16th October, 2026
IRIS Connect

You play a clip of a technique working beautifully. A hand goes up at the back: “That was a different school, with different children, in a different part of the country. It wouldn’t work with my Year 9s.”

If you lead professional development, you have probably heard some version of this. It is tempting to file it under resistance. We think it is more accurate, and considerably more useful, to treat it as a reasonable objection about transfer.

The Objection Has Evidence Behind It

Albert Bandura identified watching someone else succeed, which he called vicarious experience, as one of four sources of our belief in our own capability. It works most strongly when the observer sees the model as similar to themselves. Similarity matters.

The same holds for classroom footage. Gaudin and Chaliès, reviewing 255 studies of video in teacher development in 2015, name the major limitation of clips of unknown teachers: the contexts are often far removed from the viewers’ own classrooms, which may make them less useful. The review asks for clips that share a “family resemblance” with the viewer’s situation, in the lesson aims, in the pupils, and in the obstacles the teacher meets, so that teachers can recognise the resemblance and make something of it.

So the teacher at the back is not being difficult. They are watching a teacher who seems nothing like them.

Two Schools, the Same Realisation

Kristy Harrison, deputy head at The Charles Dickens School in Broadstairs, Kent, described this shift in an IRIS Connect leadership webinar. Her school built its early development work around Teach Like a Champion, using the published clips that come with it, filmed in American schools. Moving to clips of her own teachers is something she says the school is really proud of.

Sam Woodward, lead practitioner at Wath Academy in South Yorkshire, put the reasoning plainly. Staff can dismiss a clip from elsewhere on the grounds that it is a different setting with different children. When his team launched a whole-school focus on reading, they played five clips from five subjects, all recorded in their own classrooms, alongside the research the focus was built on. His framing: this is what we want it to look like in our setting, and it can be done.

That framing does more than teach a technique. A published clip can show how a technique works. A clip from your own school shows what you expect it to look like here, in each subject, with these pupils, and that colleagues are already doing it. In our experience, this is the main reason schools build their own library: it gives staff a shared picture of what good teaching looks like across the school.

Why a Colleague Can Beat an Expert

Teachers in research studies raise the same objection Sam’s staff do. In 2011, Zhang and colleagues ran a year-long programme in which 26 US science teachers watched three kinds of footage: published clips of teachers they did not know, lessons taught by colleagues on the programme, and their own lessons. Asked at the end of the year how useful each had been for reflecting on their practice, they rated their own lessons highest (4.6 out of 5), colleagues’ lessons next (4.2), and published clips lowest (3.7). Their most common complaint about the published clips was that the year group and subject did not match what they taught. The next was missing context: they did not know the teacher, the class, or what had happened before the camera started.

The pattern holds beyond teacher education. In 1985, Schunk and Hanson showed children who had struggled with subtraction a video of either a peer or a teacher working through the method. The children who watched a peer went on to higher self-efficacy and higher subtraction skill than those who watched the teacher.

So Do External Clips Still Earn Their Place?

Yes. Gaudin and Chaliès report that trainee and experienced teachers alike struggle to identify the relevant events in a classroom without training and a focus. Clips of unknown teachers help here: they give teachers a method for analysing practice, which they can then apply to their own and their colleagues’ footage. Zhang’s teachers said much the same. The main thing they got from the published clips was a model of how to run the analysis, and for one teacher, a sense of what to look for and what he would want to film himself.

The two kinds of footage also do different jobs. In an experiment with 67 teachers, Seidel and colleagues found that teachers watching their own lessons were more immersed and motivated, and found the experience more authentic, but were less willing to name what had gone wrong. A smaller study of ten maths teachers by Kleinknecht and Schneider found that teachers watching another teacher’s lesson analysed the problematic moments in more depth, and that disappointment in what they saw often pushed them to think of alternatives.

The review recommends an order: start with clips of unknown teachers while a method of analysis is being learned, then move to teachers’ own footage once they feel more confident.

That order exists because seeing what matters in a lesson is a skill, and other people’s footage has been a good way to learn it. It is no longer the only way in. Kleinknecht and Schneider concluded that reflecting on your own lessons needs more preparation and scaffolding than watching someone else’s. We think AI can now provide some of that scaffolding from the first recording.

IRIS Connect’s AI-assisted Pathways highlight notable moments in a teacher’s own lesson, pose reflective questions about them, and give step-by-step guidance for developing the focus the teacher chooses. A school can now begin with its own classrooms straight away, with the guidance built in. The conversation with a colleague or coach still matters. The difference is that teachers arrive at it already knowing what to look at.

Where to Start

Pathways provide guidance for effective reflection and coaching. Building a library the whole staff can learn from is a different step. At first, the library is empty at the moment the training session needs it, and filling it asks teachers to share their lessons with colleagues, which is harder. When IRIS Connect ran an EEF-funded pilot of film clubs in eleven primary schools in 2016, independently evaluated by the University of Birmingham, every school completed the first half, discussing clips from other schools. Three did not go on to film and discuss their own lessons.

Until your own clips exist, our Teaching Techniques library gives a school a bank of technique videos from day one. And a teacher who has already worked through their own lesson with Pathways has picked out the moments worth talking about, which makes Sam’s approach to filling the library with your own videos a much shorter step:

After a drop-in, tell the teacher what you saw and ask whether they would film it for the rest of the staff. He reports that staff generally agree, and that being asked is well received, because it signals their practice is worth sharing. He is candid that not everyone takes part, even several years in, but the staff who were most reluctant at the start are now among those offering clips. It is also worth involving the teacher in choosing which moment to share: Gaudin and Chaliès report positive effects when teachers help select the clips.

Reluctance to be filmed is common. Gaudin and Chaliès note that quite a few teachers are uncomfortable being filmed or having others watch the result, and some refuse to take part. It can ease with experience: three of Zhang’s teachers said their initial anxiety about being filmed reduced once they had been through it, and one who had never been recorded before described it as really frightening, and a very good experience.

Your own clips also solve a problem published footage cannot. Zhang’s teachers said they learned more when they could ask questions of the teacher in the video, and the review recommends setting out the context of any clip before viewing: the teacher’s aims, the lesson plan, samples of pupils’ work, the setting. With a clip from down the corridor, the teacher can simply be asked.

One practical note before you begin. Be clear about permission from the outset. On IRIS Connect, teachers are the only people who can share their own recording, and even once they have shared it with you, you cannot pass it on without asking them first. Say so plainly when you launch.

Each kind of footage answers a different question:

Published clips and the Teaching Techniques library show how a technique works.
AI-assisted Pathways help a teacher look closely at their own lesson and decide what to work on next.
Your own library answers the question nobody outside your school can: what good teaching looks like here, in your subjects, with your pupils.

Then start with a single question. What are the three clips you wish you had, and who in your school could film them this half term?
The point of a library of your own lessons is not the library. It is a teacher watching a colleague two doors down and thinking, for the first time, that the thing on screen is available to her.

Want to build a practice library that works for your school? If you already use IRIS Connect, speak to your consultant or email the professional development team at [email protected] about groups, sharing settings, and how other schools have made their own classrooms the centre of their professional development. If you do not have IRIS Connect yet, you can book a meeting with one of our consultants.

References

Bandura, A. (1997) Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Davies, P., Perry, T. and Kirkman, J. (2017) IRIS Connect: Developing Classroom Dialogue and Formative Feedback Through Collective Video Reflection. Evaluation Report and Executive Summary. University of Birmingham for the Education Endowment Foundation.
Gaudin, C. and Chaliès, S. (2015) ‘Video viewing in teacher education and professional development: A literature review’ Educational Research Review, 16, pp. 41-67.
Kleinknecht, M. and Schneider, J. (2013) ‘What do teachers think and feel when analyzing videos of themselves and other teachers teaching?’ Teaching and Teacher Education, 33, pp. 13-23.
Schunk, D. H. and Hanson, A. R. (1985) ‘Peer models: Influence on children’s self-efficacy and achievement’ Journal of Educational Psychology, 77(3), pp. 313-322.
Seidel, T., Stürmer, K., Blomberg, G., Kobarg, M. and Schwindt, K. (2011) ‘Teacher learning from analysis of videotaped classroom situations: does it make a difference whether teachers observe their own teaching or that of others?’ Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(2), pp. 259-267.
Zhang, M., Lundeberg, M., Koehler, M. J. and Eberhardt, J. (2011) ‘Understanding affordances and challenges of three types of video for teacher professional development’ Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(2), pp. 454-462.

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