The Mastery Arc: a continuous, adaptive coaching cycle.
Aristotal's coaching is built around a three-stage cycle: each lesson recording produces a coaching conversation, each conversation produces an action step, and each action step leads to a new recorded lesson. The cycle tightens around the specific thing the teacher is working on until it is embedded in normal practice.
The three stages are Recognise, Refine, and Realise. They happen in sequence, and then they happen again. Aristotal at the centre of the arc holds the full picture across every session.
Record your lesson. Aristotal analyses what happened.
The coaching conversation. Strategy built in dialogue.
Ten to fifteen minutes. Whenever the teacher chooses.
The coaching conversation begins when the teacher is ready. It runs through a chat interface. It is private. There is no observer, no line manager, and no recording of what is said. The teacher reads, types, and reflects at their own pace.
This is a dialogue, not a feedback report delivered by Aristotal. The coach opens by sharing what it noticed in the lesson, then asks the teacher what they were trying to achieve. From there, the conversation is Socratic: the coach asks, the teacher explains, the coach probes, and together they arrive at a specific teaching move.
The final question invites the teacher to articulate their own pedagogical theory. That articulation — making tacit practice explicit — is one of the EEF's identified mechanisms of effective professional development. The coaching builds it into the conversation as a natural part of the dialogue.
Track progress. Build a longitudinal record of professional growth.
My Progress: two goals running simultaneously.
After every coaching session, the platform updates the teacher's progress record — a living document the teacher can read, return to, and build on.
Goals are tracked at two levels simultaneously. A personal goal is specific to the individual teacher's practice and the precise classroom context they described. A school goal maps to the CPD priorities set by the school's leadership.
The school goal connects the same session to a whole-school CPD priority. The teacher works toward one thing — better teaching for this specific class — that serves both a personal and a school development agenda simultaneously.
Both goals are tracked session by session, with timestamps. Over six, eight, ten sessions, the progress record shows a complete arc: where the teacher started, what they tried, what changed, and what the transcript evidence shows about whether the change is embedding. This is the longitudinal record of professional growth that appraisal conversations, Ofsted preparation, and trust-level CPD reporting ask for. It is built automatically from the coaching sessions themselves.
For CPD Leads: the Schoolwide Dashboard →The Schoolwide Dashboard: intelligence for leaders, privacy for teachers.
Leaders do not see individual coaching conversations. They do not see the transcript from the maths lesson above, or the personal goal set for the ADHD pupil, or any other specific session content. What they see is aggregate, anonymised data across all participating teachers.
The Schoolwide Dashboard shows which departments are building new habits, where the same pedagogical challenge is appearing independently across unconnected classrooms, and where coaching engagement is strong or thin. It gives CPD leads and headteachers the kind of whole-school picture that observation schedules can approximate but rarely capture: a continuous signal from lessons happening every week, across every department.
Leaders also have access to the Leadership Coach — a separate coaching module for the professional development of leaders themselves, covering School Vision, Quality Assurance, Staff Development, Well-being and Workload, and nine other structured areas. The same audio coaching model applies: private, non-judgmental, and available whenever the leader chooses to reflect.
What the arc looks like in practice.
A teacher records a maths lesson on a Tuesday afternoon. Aristotal transcribes it immediately. That evening, the teacher opens the coaching conversation, describes what they were trying to do, and receives specific feedback on the sequencing of their explanation and the wait time they gave after questions. An action step is set: next lesson, try counting silently to ten before accepting the first answer. A personal goal is logged in the progress record.
Two weeks later, the teacher records another lesson. Aristotal reads the new transcript against the previous one. Aristotal notices that wait time has increased and asks the teacher what they observed. The teacher describes pupils giving more developed answers. The coaching conversation moves on to the next layer: what to do when a pupil gives a partially correct answer.
By session six, the progress record shows a complete arc. Wait time was identified in session one. It became instinctive by session four. The teacher's own words across the sessions document the change. The CPD lead can see, from the Schoolwide Dashboard, that the same pattern is emerging across the maths and science departments — an insight that suggests a short whole-school conversation on questioning might be worth scheduling.
This is what a coaching culture looks like when it is not dependent on timetabled release time, trained coaching pairs, or observation cycles. It runs continuously, in the background, for every teacher who chooses to use it.