Rather than merely dusting and polishing the old comfy stuff, these authors have spent 35 years trying to find out how people can learn to use new curriculums and ways of teaching. They have done some studies that would meet high standards of design, learned from peering at correlations, and stumbled on important things while teaching kids and…

A randomized trial study, conducted over two school years in 18 high schools in Washington, finds that "An Inquiry Approach," a three-year, educative curriculum for high school science, has a positive impact on student achievement, teacher practice, and fidelity of implementation of the curriculum when the curriculum is paired with…

As a result of a dramatic shift over the last 10 years in how educators and administrators are supported in their professional learning, teachers are no longer working in isolation behind closed doors. Instead, professional learning has moved to the school and the classroom, and teachers are encouraged to share their work and their students' work.…

Rather than just teach students facts about history, high school social studies teacher Amy Presley searched for ways to create meaningful experiences they would remember forever. This article describes how she found a group of social studies educators using a Twitter hashtag as a way to share resources and improve her teaching skills. Energized…

Probing is a communication skill that provides the psychological safety teachers need to share their perspectives, inquire into those of others, and reconsider what they have been doing and how they have been thinking about it. In their book, "The Collaborative Analysis of Student Learning: Professional Learning That Promotes Success for…

This article describes the actions taken by the members of the school leadership team at McWhirter Elementary Professional Development Laboratory School in Webster, Texas, when the results of the state reading assessment in spring 2010, had taken a sudden and dramatic drop from the previous year. The team designed an action research study to…

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…

A fundamental problem that continues to plague educators is the achievement gap between low-income and higher-income students. In the ongoing search for solutions, one of the more promising approaches is expanding opportunities for learning, particularly in the summer. This article describes a project funded by The Wallace Foundation that offers…

The Learning School Alliance is a network of schools collaborating about professional practice. The network embodies Learning Forward's purpose to advance effective job-embedded professional learning that leads to student outcomes. A key component of Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning is a focus on collaborative learning,…

In this article, the author discusses content focus and coherence, which are fundamental to professional development that helps teachers boost student learning. Learning Forward's Outcomes standard emphasizes that teacher learning should be focused on subject-matter content and how students learn that content, and consistent with the individual,…

Teacher beliefs have a profound impact on instructional practice. According to Pajares (1992), beliefs determine how much effort a teacher puts forth and how long he or she will persist in the face of adversity. Many beliefs can be traced back to experiences teachers had when they were in school. Those early recollections of school events tend to…

Joellen Killion is senior advisor to Learning Forward. In each issue of JSD, Killion explores a recent research study to help practitioners understand the impact of particular professional learning practices on student outcomes. The study presented here builds on past research about the relationships between teacher practice and beliefs, teacher…

The experiences in the school districts highlighted in this article clarify a set of broad goals that all professional learning communities can use to assess their effectiveness: (1) Culture; (2) Knowledge; (3) Practice; and (4) Achievement. These schools and districts have an ongoing commitment to all four goals. All of them have instituted…

Consider for a moment how launching a professional learning community is similar to starting a race. Athletes know the danger of false starts--moving before the starting signal. Until recently, a false start meant that all racers returned to the blocks to begin again, their adrenalin gone, their concentration broken. Because these effects could…

Adopting new curricula presents both a need and an opportunity for professional development to advance teacher content knowledge and instructional practices for achieving curriculum-specific student outcomes. This study examines two modalities of professional development: face-to-face in a summer workshop and online that included two days of…