By Ildar Illiazov, Head of Projects & Marketing, Light Group of Schools, Kenya

 

 

Putting the professional back in PD

For many educators, a familiar professional development (PD) experience used to mean gathering in an auditorium, listening passively to an outside expert’s lecture, taking a few notes, and returning to class unsure what has changed or what they’ve learned.

Schools spent substantial resources on PD but the PD experiences remained passive, disconnected, and ultimately ineffective.

Schools working towards CIS International Accreditation are encouraged to think about themselves as learning organizations—how they learn and improve as a whole community. Systems thinking and organizational learning are at the core of CIS’ Learning Communities Protocol. Professional learning is a component that must be purposeful, collaborative, and embedded within the culture of the school, not one-off events.

Thankfully, many schools, including Light Group of Schools, are rethinking how professional learning happens.

Here’s what we learned from our two-year project to investigate what lies beneath the formal structures of our institution—what we call the ’real structure’, beyond job titles and organizational charts.

What emerged was a powerful insight: the most effective professional learning doesn’t come from top-down mandates. It happens through informal networks, trusted relationships, and peer-driven collaboration.

This is the social capital of a school, and it’s time we make it the foundation of PD.

The social capital—the web of relationships that supports collaboration, trust, and shared learning—could be considered the hidden driver of school improvement.

 

 

Beyond the staffroom

In 2023, we launched a diagnostic project to understand how staff were working together, and where they wanted stronger connections. We wanted to know: Who collaborates with whom? Who’s isolated? Whose advice do people value, regardless of title? The results were eye-opening.

We started with a simple question: What makes professional learning stick?

We discovered that while our formal organizational chart looked neat and hierarchical, the real story of collaboration was far more complex. It did not show how collaboration really worked. Influence and impact didn’t always follow job titles.

We learned that it is not flashy keynotes or one-off webinars that makes PD stick. It’s our colleagues. The colleagues we trust. The colleagues we turn to for advice. The ones who visit our classrooms not to evaluate, but to learn.

The most trusted and connected educators weren’t necessarily in leadership roles. Some colleagues with formal leadership roles were surprisingly peripheral in terms of day-to-day professional influence.

Educators with strong, trusted relationships were also the ones most actively participating in peer learning, formal and informal feedback exchanges, and joint planning.

In other words, where social capital was strong, professional learning thrived.

 

A tale of two networks

To understand this better, we used social network analysis—a way to map relationships—to look at two things: actual collaboration (who you work with now) and potential collaboration (who you’d like to work with).

We built these maps using simple, revealing questions:

• “Whose lessons do you currently visit to exchange ideas?”
• “If you faced a professional challenge, who would you consult?”
• “Who would you want on a task force to improve teaching and learning?”

In 2023, our school’s professional network was fragmented. Nearly a quarter of staff were isolated—meaning they had no recorded professional interactions with colleagues. Most collaboration stayed within departments. The network had few strong links across team, a small number of formal leaders carried most of the influence.

By 2025, after a focused effort to improve trust and cross-team collaboration, the number of isolated members had nearly halved.

Even more striking: the number of Simmelian ties—three-way relationships signalling deep trust—nearly doubled.

Staff were more connected, and more of those connections were reciprocal suggesting a culture where colleagues were recognizing and supporting each other was taking root.

This did not happen by accident. We stopped seeing professional learning as content to deliver and started seeing it as relationships to build.

Importantly, we used ongoing analysis of network data throughout the project to guide our decisions. By comparing our 2023 and 2025 maps, we were able to monitor progress, identify areas where collaboration remained limited, and adjust our approach in real time.

CIS International Accreditation recognises that a strong collaborative professional culture helps schools learn and improve community wide. Our network data provided evidence that this culture was becoming stronger.

The changes were significant.

 

Redesigning PD around people

What would happen if we stopped designing PD around topics and started designing it around trust?

That’s what we tried.

Instead of dictating workshop agendas at a school leadership level, we began by identifying key ‘bridges’ in our network—educators who connected different departments or teams. We invited them to co-lead PD sessions, not because of their titles, but because colleagues trusted and learned from them.

Our approach closely aligns with CIS’ professional learning design principles. Learning should be personalised, interactive, collaborative, engaging and challenging, it should empower learner agency experienced within a supportive environment, inquiry-driven, collaborative, and responsive to the needs of the community.

We created opportunities for reciprocal classroom visits, collaborative inquiry cycles, and informal peer coaching. Participation was voluntary but encouraged.

The only rule? No top-down observation. Just educators learning from educators. One-sided observations don’t build trust. Mutual exchanges do.

Suddenly, PD wasn’t something “given” to teachers. It was something they built together.

One powerful example: a middle school science teacher and a primary math teacher began a joint inquiry into cross-grade conceptual understanding.

It started informally, just a conversation in the corridor. With encouragement, they turned it into a small action research project. They co-facilitated a PD session on what they’d learned, and their session ended up sparking new collaborations across departments.

We didn’t need a consultant to tell us how to improve. We needed to listen to our own educators.

 

The hidden cost of ignoring trust

For PD to be meaningful, staff need to feel safe to share ideas, try new approaches, and reflect honestly. That kind of culture is built one relationship at a time. PD can fail when it ignores how people feel, connect and work together.

Educators find it harder to learn when they do not feel safe to speak openly, ask questions, or admit challenges. And psychological safety doesn’t come from policy, it comes from trust. It’s not an optional extra, it is a foundational condition for effective professional learning.

In our survey, we asked staff about their perceptions of leadership, value, and peer relationships.

Between 2023 and 2025, trust in leadership rose, satisfaction with professional relationships grew, and more staff felt recognized as valued by their colleagues.

These aren’t abstract improvements, these changes mattered, because they represented shifts in how our teachers experienced their work and whether they felt empowered to grow.

 

Informal leaders, real influence

One of the most intriguing findings of our project was the role of informal leaders—people without formal leadership roles who are widely trusted and consulted by their peers.

Many of them had been elevated and recognised as leaders, demonstrating the diagnostic power of social network data in identifying latent leadership.

This shift from hierarchical to horizontal leadership, away from leadership based on titles, what Fullan and Hargreaves (2012) describe as “leading from the middle”, helped create a more resilient organizational structure.

The network no longer relied on a few ‘bottleneck’ individuals. Influence was distributed, and the school was less vulnerable to disruption.

Leadership is understood not simply as positional authority, but as something shared across the community and built through relationships; there are people playing a critical role in shaping the professional culture, the “go-to” people for advice, collaboration, and mentoring.

Recognizing this, we began involving them more intentionally in the design and delivery of PD. Not by promoting them, but by honouring their impact.

When PD is anchored in these authentic trusted relationships, it becomes more responsive, relevant, and sustainable.

As one teacher put it: “It wasn’t that we did more PD. It’s that PD finally felt like it belonged to us.”

 

From silos to systems

Many schools have silos where departments and grade levels can become separated from one another. Bringing people together to break the silos requires more than team-building exercises. It requires structural changes to how we organize collaboration.

We restructured meeting times to allow for more cross-functional planning. We created rotating leadership roles for PD committees. We began inviting staff into professional learning conversations not as observers, but as contributors.

The result? A more coherent, connected learning community. And as our network maps showed, the overlap between actual and potential connections grew steadily, meaning that the relationships teachers wanted to build were finally becoming a reality.

As emphasised by CIS International Accreditation, schools must function as coherent systems rather than disconnected parts. Strengthening these connections was not just about collaboration, it was about aligning practice across the organisation to support consistent, high-quality learning for an entire community.

 

Practical applications

In the second part of this two-part series, I will share five practical takeaways for school leaders who want to build a trust-based, collaborative culture.

For our school community, the outcomes have been significant: stronger relationships, more shared leadership, and professional learning that feels owned by educators.