Introducing My Teaching Journey: Your Personal Growth Story, Brought to Life

Today, we’re launching what we believe is the most important upgrade to Starlight to date.

It’s called My Teaching Journey — a living, evolving map of your professional growth that turns everyday reflection into a clear, coherent story of how your practice is changing over time.

For the first time, teachers can see their development: the patterns, the strengths, the shifts in focus, and the tiny adjustments that add up to real impact. Not as a score. Not as a judgement. But as a story that belongs entirely to them.

🌟 Why We Built My Teaching Journey

Since May, teachers using Starlight have been building an extraordinary dataset: hundreds of small reflections, insights, and moments of practice captured after real lessons.

We realised something powerful:

When viewed together, these reflections reveal a trajectory — a professional journey that no observation, no one-off CPD event, and no performance cycle has ever been able to show.

Teachers told us they wanted:

• A way to track what they’ve been working on

• A sense of momentum

• A clearer understanding of their strengths

• Gentle guidance on what might help next

• Something that feels supportive, private, and meaningful

My Teaching Journey is our answer to that.

🌱 What My Teaching Journey Shows You

Each journey is completely personalised — built from your own reflective sessions, your classroom contexts, and the goals you’ve been exploring.

Teachers now receive:

1. A Narrative Overview of Their Craft

A long-form, human-sounding reflection that captures who you are as a teacher right now: your habits, your aspirations, your classroom culture, and the changes you’ve been steadily making.

It reads like someone has truly seen your practice — because Starlight has, piece by piece, through your own words.

2. Signature Strengths

Your journey highlights the patterns that keep reappearing in your reflections: your follow-through, your questioning, your adaptability, your ability to draw out quieter voices. These aren’t generic strengths. They’re grounded in your actual practice.

3. Areas You’re Actively Developing

Not weaknesses — directions of travel. Teachers see where their focus has subtly shifted over time, and how their reflections have grown more precise.

4. Your Current Focus — with Practical Next Steps

Each journey ends with tailored suggestions for the next few lessons and the next month: workable actions, short checkpoints, questioning moves, and reflection prompts that integrate smoothly into real classrooms.

5. A Cadence of Growth

Your Journal now updates automatically once you add three new reflective sessions. For long-term perspective, your All-Time Journey refreshes every two weeks — giving teachers a calm, steady rhythm for reflection.

🔍 What Makes This Different from Anything Else in Schools

My Teaching Journey is not a performance tool.

It exists for one purpose: to help teachers think more deeply about their practice, without pressure, judgement, or comparison.

It brings together:

• your voice

• your context

• your reflections

• your evolving aims

…and turns them into something coherent, insightful, and motivating.

Teachers often tell us: “I know I’m improving — I just can’t always see it.” Now they can.

📈 A Quiet Revolution in Professional Growth

Across early journeys, one thing is already clear: teachers reflect far more than any coaching model has ever captured.

In one example, a teacher logged 172 reflective sessions between May and November — each one small, quick, and private. Taken together, those 172 micro-moments produced a deep, textured portrait of teaching that would have been impossible to build any other way.

This is the promise of My Teaching Journey: small reflections becoming big insight. Small moves adding up to meaningful growth.

The story of your teaching — finally visible.

🚀 What Happens Next

My Teaching Journey is live today for everyone using the Starlight Teaching Insights with Rating Scale report type.

To update your journey:

1. Teach a lesson

2. Upload your audio

3. Add a short reflective note

4. Your journey evolves — automatically

As more teachers adopt this rhythm, we believe Starlight will become the most powerful reflective engine in UK schools: a quiet, steady companion that helps teachers refine their craft one lesson, one insight, one week at a time.

✨ Closing Thought

My Teaching Journey represents the heart of Starlight:

Private growth, grounded in your own practice, powered by insight rather than pressure.

It's the clearest expression yet of our philosophy:

Spark Insight . Engineer Progress.

🎥 Subscribe to our channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@Star21-ai

🌐 Read more on our blog: www.coaching.software

💡 Explore the platform: www.starlightmentor.com

🐦 Follow us on X: @star21starlight

The Insight Engine is written by Adam Sturdee, co-founder of Starlight—the UK’s first AI-powered coaching platform—and Assistant Headteacher at St Augustine’s Catholic College. This blog is part of a wider mission to support educators through meaningful reflection, not performance metrics. It documents the journey of building Starlight from the ground up, and explores how AI, when shaped with care, can reduce workload, surface insight, and help teachers think more deeply about their practice. Rooted in the belief that growth should be private, professional, and purposeful, The Insight Engine offers ideas and stories that put insight—not judgment—at the centre of development.