While Title II has been maintained for the 2018 budget cycle, in large part due to the voices of educators, including many Learning Forward members, we are not in the clear. We must continue to advocate for high quality professional learning, a critical component of the work of all educators, to ensure that vital funding…

By Janice Poda Several years ago, I was an expert witness in an equitable funding lawsuit in my home state on behalf of the plaintiff school districts. After court recessed on a very tense day on the witness stand, I took a drive through the small town where court was being held — the same…

By Whitney Young What do you get when you gather a 1st-grade teacher, district instructional coach, assistant principal, principal, director of technology, director of human resources, and a superintendent? These are the members of my Learning Forward Academy learning team — a team that has been working together for two years to solve the significant…

Educators seeking new information to improve teaching strategies and connections with students know that it can be a challenge to integrate new ideas into existing routines and day-to-day practices. While social and emotional learning may seem like a new development to be studied and adopted, it isn’t about adding one program or strategy. Rather, it’s…

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 a teacher, but what about…

While engaged in cycles of inquiry or improvement, teams may collaborate to write SMART goals for students but skip the stage of writing goals for themselves. However, a deliberate focus on educator learning with intentional goal setting is what makes a learning cycle particularly valuable for educators and is unique to Learning Forward’s team learning…

By Michelle Bowman The Student Success Learning Network, a collaboration of 15 school districts facilitated by Learning Forward, is focused on supporting students in college and career readiness. Districts participating in the network learn strategies and tactics to effect change on a chosen readiness indicator. After an initial planning session with each system’s team lead…

By Peter Carpenter When did you first learn about rocks? I distinctly remember sitting in my fourth-grade classroom at Wedgewood Elementary School in Turnersville, New Jersey in the mid-1980’s learning about rocks. My teacher called out the four different types of rocks, and I remember one name jumping out at me as she wrote the…

For Teacher Appreciation Week this year, we wanted to hear how teachers not only inspire their students, but also how they inspire other educators. We asked professional developers everywhere to share how teachers have inspired them. To make it even more exciting, whoever received the most shares or retweets would win a brand new iPad!…