This article focuses on the "learning leader," exploring "What is professional learning leadership at its core?" Leaders of professional learning come to their responsibility from many roles, from teacher to district administrator, to instructional coach. They set the agenda for professional learning by aligning it to…

Teacher coaching is a powerful form of professional learning that improves teaching practices and student achievement, yet little is known about the specific aspects of coaching programs that are more effective. Researchers used a blocked randomized experiment to study the effects of one-to-one coaching on teacher practice. When pooled across all…

Just like in a classroom, a professional learning facilitator needs to base planning and instruction on assessment. Adult learners need the learning experience to be as focused as possible on their questions and their teaching circumstances. Whether the professional learning is a half-day session or extends over multiple school years, leaders can…

Student success depends on effective teaching--not just occasionally, but every day in every classroom and school. Effective teaching impacts students' academic, physical, social-emotional, and behavioral well-being. Generating a vision, developing an instructional framework, and delineating student learning outcomes by themselves are insufficient…

IMPACT, Washington, D.C.'s controversial evaluation system, sets clear expectations for instruction and holds teachers to well-defined standards of performance. Now into its third year, the program appears to be meeting its goals of rewarding effective teachers and eliminating educators it considers incompetent. And it has given the public reason…

Self-study teacher research is designed to encourage teachers to be agents of their own reform initiatives while working collaboratively with school colleagues. It has proven useful to an array of educators coming from multiple disciplines and programs. In self-study, teachers critically examine their actions and the context of those actions as a…

In 2006, the Weld County School District Re-8 in Fort Lupton, Colorado, was eager to find a way to increase teacher effectiveness and, as a result, improve student achievement. This small, semirural district about 35 miles northeast of Denver grappled with high teacher turnover (34% in 2005) and low scores on state assessments (three out of four…

Implementing teacher evaluation systems across the United States has created both challenges and opportunities to improving teacher quality. Lessons learned at the state level illustrate a wide range of challenges with system implementation, including value-added growth scores, implementation timetables, and human capital demands (McGuinn, 2012),…

Without adequate time and resources, it is impossible for school districts and schools to support professional learning that leads to effective teaching practices, supportive leadership, and improved student results. That's why one of the seven new standards in Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning focuses specifically on…

Learning Forward introduces new Standards for Professional Learning. This is the third iteration of standards outlining the characteristics of professional learning that lead to effective teaching practices, supportive leadership, and improved student results. The standards are not a prescription for how education leaders and public officials…

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…

Four years ago, Learning Forward established "affecting the policy context" as the first of five strategic priorities that would guide its efforts through 2011. Learning Forward believes that good policy promotes good practice and that laws and policies that promote and support effective professional development are needed to achieve the…

Hurricane Katrina blew across the St. Bernard Parish Public Schools district in Chalmette, Louisiana, on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, bringing with it a wall of water that flooded everything for miles, putting the school system's 18 buildings under several feet of water filled with mud, gasoline, oil, dead fish, and other debris. Eleven weeks…

What would happen if people found agreement around the world on what constitutes high-expertise teaching? For one thing, there would be a set of standards universally embraced that clearly defines core agreements about good teaching and learning. It would be obvious that proficiency in the knowledge, skills, and practices that comprise good…

Three years ago, the Toronto District School Board, the largest in Canada and the fourth-largest in North America, began to explore demonstration classrooms as a way to create a richer model of job-embedded, differentiated, and personalized professional learning. By doing action research and examining a variety of professional learning models from…