I have worked for 30 years at Learning Forward and that has required a tremendous amount of travel. On every trip, I ask the people I meet to tell me about their schools. While my data collection methods are quite unscientific, my findings are very similar to those highlighted in national polls. Taxi drivers who…
I’d like to send a shout-out to New America and authors Melissa Tooley and Taylor White for their recently released report, Rethinking Relicensure: Promoting Professional Learning Through Teacher Licensure Renewal Policies. After exploring how states handle relicensure, particularly when it comes to creating systems that contribute to enhancing educators’ effectiveness through professional learning, the authors…
Judy Newhouse, executive director of Learning Forward Virginia, is a passionate advocate for the power of professional learning on schools and students. When she was recently invited to a conference, she saw an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. Representative Bobby Scott (VA-3), Ranking Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Workforce Committee, was…
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…