Thomas Manning

In the majority of schools, a new teacher assumes essentially the same responsibilities as an experienced one. This puts the novice teacher — and her students — at a significant disadvantage. New teachers often lack the real-world wisdom, experience, resources, and skills veteran teachers have gained from years of experience. […]

The Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI) is a confidential, web-based survey that schools and districts have used to measure their alignment with the standards, identify strengths and areas of focus in their professional learning, and plan professional learning that gets results for teachers and students. Standards Assessment Inventory results help schools […]

Collecting evidence of professional learning’s impact starts with assessing the current state of professional learning in any school or system. Measuring whether and how practices are impacting teaching and learning can shape the approaches that systems start, stop, and continue and increases the likelihood that professional learning strategies and programs […]

Consider a scenario where you’re a member of a school's in-house instructional staff and you receive a link to a professional learning survey from someone at the district. For a moment you think, “Wait, I already turned in my exit ticket…the room was too cold but we had an interesting […]

Middle school teacher Leighann Fields remembers her earliest teaching experiences with mixed emotions. “When I was student teaching, the teacher I worked with had been at the school forever, and she knew so much. But she didn’t share it with me. I had to reinvent the wheel while I was […]

Effective mentors set clear expectations for their work with the teachers they support. This is a critical step in the process of building trust between mentor and mentee, and it is never more important than when mentors conduct observations of teachers as they engage in classroom instruction. With much teaching […]

Many of us have been lucky enough in our lives that we can identify someone we'd call a mentor, someone who taught us how things work and helped us navigate through the difficulties we face trying to establish ourselves. For some of us, our mentor may very well have been […]

Many of us have been lucky enough in our lives that we can identify someone we’d call a mentor, someone who taught us how things work and helped us navigate through the difficulties we face trying to establish ourselves. For some of us, our mentor may very well have been […]

Learning Forward receives more inquiries about support for instructional coaches than any other consulting service we provide. School-based instructional coaching has the power to influence teacher practice, student learning, and school culture, and coaches play an essential role in ensuring the continuous learning of everyone in a school. In many […]