As part of the Redesign Professional Development (PD) Community of Practice, which includes 22 school systems across the country, Pittsburgh Public Schools is working to build greater alignment and coherence into its professional learning efforts. That means creating a district-wide professional learning system that helps the schools grow…

How do educators at a systems level know that professional learning is impacting teacher practice in a way that leads to improved student outcomes? California's Long Beach Unified School District, a member of Learning Forward's Redesign PD Community of Practice, partnered with other districts from across the country to answer that question. As…

When teachers who deeply understand the needs of their students and colleagues lead professional learning in their schools, everyone benefits. In this article, five educators and their perspectives on teacher leadership are featured. These educators have all taught low-income urban children in elementary grades for several years, but in different…

As they write about the Learning Communities standard in "Reach the Highest Standard in Professional Learning: Learning Communities," authors Ann Lieberman and Lynne Miller consider why communities have gained widespread attention and support and summarize the established research base about them. They also describe three contexts in…

Effective and authentic communities of practice in schools have the potential to support teachers in improving their instructional practices around perennial challenges, such as improving the literacy skills of all students. But before they can achieve such goals, communities of practice take time to build, effort to sustain, and ongoing support…

Educators working to achieve changes in classroom teaching practices that lead to improvement in student learning need to gain clarity in where they are going--what they want to accomplish. Teachers in a professional learning community need a road map as they begin learning and applying a new practice to ensure they reach their intended goal…

Educators have begun to use protocols to facilitate professional development in online spaces--partly because people need to connect from different places, but also to take advantage of new environments for learning. For example, asynchronous tools, such as discussion forums, blogs, or Google+, where participants post messages to one another at…

Professional learning communities have long been considered a powerful form of collaborative professional learning, as the Learning Communities standard in Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning attests (Learning Forward, 2011). This focus on communities can engage teachers in ongoing professional dialogue and examination of…

This article describes the knowledge and skills that professional learning community members need to create a habit out of their desire. Habits serve educators as signposts of progress toward achieving their desires. They are interim indicators of a professional learning community's success. Ultimately, of course, professional learning communities…

The challenges of implementing the Common Core State Standards and Science Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) provide momentum for facilitating teacher learning far beyond the capacity of current formal and informal professional development in most school districts. The implementation of the curricula that substantially increase the learning…

An athletic coach's focus is to develop individual skills as well as the collective capacity of the team to perform at the highest level. A coaching culture applies the same concept to schools. While coaching in schools is not new, what is fundamentally different in a culture of coaching is that all members of the school community see themselves…

The study reviewed in this article provides empirical evidence that effective professional development has a positive and significant impact on instructional practices, not only for those who directly experience professional development, but also for colleagues who receive help and support from those who have participated directly and thus gained…

This article describes a novel effort in New York City, the Learning Partners Program, which matches veteran principals with two or more newer ones. In 2014-15, the first full year of the effort, the city's Department of Education put 73 of the city's more than 1,800 schools into 23 groups of threes and one group of four. Every group comprised one…

When teachers collaborate in schools, taking collective responsibility to improve instruction and achieve goals, student performance improves and good results happen. Wyoming is one example of a state that uses peer-to-peer professional learning with notable results. Teachers joined together to form a statewide professional community and saw the…

Research highlights the importance of individualized approaches and coaching to ongoing professional learning (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). The purpose of this article is to describe an initiative that set out to help all students become proficient readers by 3rd grade. It demonstrates how coaching can support…