Director of Communications Tracy Crow explains how collaboration, communities, networks, and time for learning are only useful when learners employ them with purpose and are most likely to lead to change with sustained support and effort.
What We Say And What We Mean
Turn Your Networking Into Powerful Professional Learning
Executive Director Stephanie Hirsh shares the importance of networking and the ways to make these interactions most effective to you in your role.
10 strategies to develop teacher agency in 2017
Teacher agency is fundamental to effective professional learning. Read how Dawn Wilson gained inspiration from a retiring educator’s comments about the ineffectiveness of much professional development.
The Academy model: A Q&A with graduates
Establishing problems of practice, coaching, and engaging in face-to-face networking can have a huge impact on any professional learning program. See how these strategies have contributed to transforming the practice of two graduates of Learning Forward’s Academy.
Collaboration is the answer
An excerpt from Becoming a Learning Team by Stephanie Hirsh and Tracy Crow In Learning Forward’s (2011) Standards for Professional Learning, educators learning in community is a key structure for addressing many of the problems common in traditional models of teaching and learning and creating support among teachers. Learning community: Professional learning that increases educator…
Let’s make the most of teachers’ time together
Research has shown that effective collaboration results in higher levels of learning and performance by educators and students. Yet we also know that merely setting aside time and room for teams to work together does not guarantee these benefits. So what are the essential elements of effective collaboration? Many of the answers lie in the…
How and when do you learn?
After 30 years in education, I have never felt more dedicated to student success and the adults that support that success. The education world talks a lot about how students learn. Is it just as important to consider how educators learn? I think so.
Whatever name you give it, the PLC plays an important role
In my view, no learning model has captured educators’ attention more than collaborative learning structures. Over the last few decades, they’ve had many names, starting with professional learning communities (PLCs). In some corners, they became professional learning networks or learning teams. We also use the terms communities of practice and networked improvement communities. The approach…
Spread effective teaching from room to room
When I was a local school board member, parents frequently asked for my advice on how to ensure their child got a particular teacher in a school. I knew how the game would be played after I reminded them this wasn’t the role of the school board: They would write the principal with their requests for the next year. The principal would respond to assure the parents that no matter which classroom their child was assigned, he or she would have a great year.
How I became a learning leader
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…