The Minnesota Elementary School Principals' Association offered Minnesota principals professional learning that placed a high priority on literacy instruction and developing a collegial culture. A key component is the literacy classroom visit, an observation protocol used to gather data to determine the status of literacy teaching and student…

Time for collaborative learning is an essential resource for educators working to implement college- and career-ready standards. The pages in this article include tools from the workbook "Establishing Time for Professional Learning." The tools support a complete process to help educators effectively find and use time. The following…

Every day, teachers and administrators come to work and do the best job they know how. In the book "School Systems That Learn" (Ash & D'Auria, 2013), the authors argue that most school systems, as they are currently designed, have reached or nearly reached the limits of their capacity and that systemic change is necessary to…

Teachers, curriculum experts, and other educators work together using online tools developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create high-quality, useful lessons and research-based instructional tools incorporating the Common Core State Standards.

The idea of teacher leadership holds an immense and intuitive appeal. Most educators agree that teacher leaders are essential to fostering a climate of authentic and robust leadership and learning across a school. Teacher leadership is peer leading at its most authentic, demanding, and empowering. While the value of teacher leadership may be…

Much has been written about the value, need, and complexity of differentiating learning within every classroom based on student readiness, motivation and interest, apparent skills, learning preferences or styles, and identified cognitive needs. Teachers are encouraged to look at differentiation for students not as a formula for teaching, but…

To implement the Common Core State Standards, teachers will need a broader knowledge base, a more diverse tool kit for teaching and learning, and greater experience with teaching in a standards-based environment. The growth required over the next three years seems to be large. The author works in a district that has provided an ongoing, continual…

Teacher internships give business education teachers the opportunity to increase their industry skill proficiency levels. Such experiences can help business education teachers focus on developing relevant technical knowledge and skills to better prepare students for technically enhanced work environments and demonstrate competency on technical…

Having data about student academic performance motivates school leaders to perform better as educators, and tells them where they need to concentrate their efforts to improve. As principal of Ernie Pyle Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this author finds that the constant use of relevant data helps him stay focused on his instructional…

This article discusses the challenge of finding time for learning teams to meet. The author firmly believes that teachers have the capacity to develop solutions that best meet their needs and the needs of their students. She believes that if the teachers know that their learning and teamwork is in the best interests of their students, they will be…

Teachers are leaders when they function in professional learning communities to affect student learning, contribute to school improvement, inspire excellence in practice, and empower stakeholders to participate in educational improvement. From an equity perspective, teachers also lead when they serve as change agents who collaborate to use…

One way to approach the improvement of instruction is for educators to learn from student interactions in cultural events that fully engage students' motivation and curiosity. In such a context, educators get to know students in new ways and to connect student strengths to classroom instruction. This can be especially powerful when the learning…

The time-honored children's story "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" is a prime example of someone having the kind of day people would like to avoid. Having a bad day can happen to anyone--even a dedicated literacy coach. An important component of coaching is building collaborative working relationships between the coach…

Professional development as a term and as a strategy has run its course. The future of improvement, indeed of the profession itself, depends on a radical shift in how people conceive learning and the conditions under which teachers and students work. In this article, the author discusses five key ideas that together foreshadow his argument and…

Examines the parallels, and common goals and characteristics, between staff development and curriculum development and discusses the implications these parallels have for staff developers. (GLR)