The road to leadership is not necessarily one that educators plan carefully with a series of logical steps. Certainly some educators start as teachers and then systematically work through a traditional hierarchy on their way to the superintendency. No matter their role or their path, education leaders demand more from themselves and others and…

Learning Forward is fortunate to work with stakeholders in a range of roles and from all kinds of contexts, including schools and systems, higher education, teacher associations, foundations, government, and corporations. While the organization and the people it works with cover a lot of ground in and beyond education, they welcome the luxury of…

Educators are demanding learning specific to their needs, and there are more options than ever for school systems to personalize learning. Sometimes these personalized learning options go hand-in-hand with teacher effectiveness systems that districts use to identify areas for educator growth. At the same time, schools and teams set collective…

Kristen Weatherby is a senior policy analyst at OECD in the education directorate. She runs the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and is author or co-author of publications and blog posts on TALIS and teachers. She started her career as a classroom teacher in the United States before working in education in the private sector in…

As school districts create systems to identify, monitor, and assess teacher effectiveness, they consider a variety of sources, including observations of teaching practices and analysis of student assessments. A new voice--student perceptions--has emerged as a valuable source of information. In many districts, leaders are collecting data from a…

This article presents an interview with Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research interests include the use of emerging technologies in education, with emphases on online professional development, scaling up innovations, and immersive interfaces for learning. He is…

Beverly Hall has been superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools since 1999. Before coming to Atlanta, Hall was state district superintendent of Newark Public Schools, deputy chancellor for instruction of New York City Public Schools, superintendent of Community School District 27 in New York City, and a principal in Brooklyn. Hall chairs Harvard…

This article presents an interview with Judith Warren Little, the Carol Liu Professor of Education Policy at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. She is a sociologist whose research and teaching interests focus on the organizational and policy contexts of teaching and teacher learning. She concentrates especially…

Education policy in the province of Alberta is set by Alberta Education, a ministry led by the province's minister of education. There are two key policies or ministerial orders that guide professional learning in Alberta. The Teaching Quality Standard outlines the knowledge, skills, and attributes that teachers are expected to possess. The…

This article presents an interview with Richard F. Elmore on the need for educators to develop a collective practice. Elmore is the Gregory R. Anrig professor of educational leadership at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is also the co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). His research…