Learning Forward

Fixing Education  America the Fixable: The Broken Promise of American Education The Atlantic, 2012 In this series, The Atlantic covers aspects of public education and how to reform the system with reports from a wide variety of experts in the field, including Michael Fullan on “What America can learn from […]

Learning communities are moving beyond their adolescent years, and you can see their evolution in education literature, in practice, and in the Standards for Professional Learning. The earlier Standards for Staff Development (NSDC, 2001) included Collaboration and Learning Communities. Both emphasized the process and structure of learning collaboratively. For example, […]

When an educator tells me, “We’re doing professional learning communities this year,” that phrasing makes me wonder whether they’re simply forming new small groups or undertaking the multiyear effort it takes to move teachers from working as individuals to the deep collaboration that marks effective, sustainable professional learning communities. Consider […]

The professional learning community movement has taught educators that “a collection of superstar teachers working in isolation cannot produce the same results as interdependent colleagues who share and develop professional practices together” (Garmston & Wellman, 1999, p.18). This means that professional learning communities are key to the development, nourishment, and […]

Being a principal was the most demanding job I ever had. I worked hard, mostly in isolation. Like most principals, I struggled to manage the position’s political and bureaucratic necessities in order to concentrate on what I thought was the fundamental work of schools: teaching and learning. I struggled to […]

“I’ve been through five years of 17 different initiatives, and nothing seemed to fit together. Halfway through my first day of authentic intellectual work training, the light bulb came on, and I thought: This is the piece that’s been missing.” Spencer (Iowa) High School teacher leader, 2011 This reaction is […]

On a highway that cuts through the downtown of a large urban city was a billboard that read: “Want to teach? When can you start?” It made us think long and hard about the message society sends to teachers: Anyone can teach. That phrase could come right out of the […]

Imagine a system of learning such as this, where learning for everyone is pervasive, where adults routinely let go of their expertise in ways that enable authentic exploration of new ideas and new practices, and where they expect to take risks. Imagine a system that publicly references their “problems of […]

Connecting The Standards For Professional Learning As the introduction to the Standards for Professional Learning states, “They are the essential elements of professional learning that function in synergy to enable educators to increase their effectiveness and student learning” (Learning Forward, 2011, p. 14). Assess Collective Responsibility in Your School One […]