Learning Forward Team Grant awardees

Meet this year’s winners of the Learning Forward Foundation Team Grant, given to a team of educators making an effort to advance Learning Forward’s vision: Excellent teaching and learning every day. This year’s winners are from Northern Valley Regional High School District in Demarest, New Jersey, led by Supervisor of Professional Learning Kathleen O’Flynn, Linda Mayer, and Virginia Senande. Northern Valley has traditionally recognized its leaders to be the superintendent, principal, and high school subject supervisors. With the changing demands of instructional leadership, new leadership groups have evolved within the region. Read about the challenges the district faces and the team’s plan to address those challenges.

Redesign PD Community of Practice

Learn more about Learning Forward’s Redesign PD Community of Practice, launched to support 20 of the nation’s leading school districts and charter management organizations in addressing systemwide educator and student learning priorities. The community engages teams from these districts in identifying their local professional learning challenges and creating scalable solutions.

Collectively, systems participating in the community employ more than 160,000 certified teachers and enroll 2.3 million students, more than 5% of the public school students in the country. Learning Forward serves as the community’s facilitator and coordinator and will capture and publish lessons learned and tools to share with the broader field of education.

Standards Assessment Inventory

Assess the quality of your system’s professional learning with the Standards Assessment Inventory. The 50-item, web-enabled survey helps ensure professional learning increases teaching effectiveness and gets results for educators and students. States, regional service centers, and school systems use the tool to measure teacher perceptions of professional learning and guide the planning, facilitation, implementation, and evaluation of professional learning to maximize its impact and investment. Download the free info guide for more information, including sample questions and pricing.

Research underscores collaboration’s impact

In this blog post, Learning Forward Executive Director Stephanie Hirsh expands on a Learning Policy Institute teaching effectiveness research review. The report draws on 30 recent research studies to highlight key findings and make policy recommendations. Hirsh notes that the study comes as state and district educators are creating plans to use federal funds within the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) aligned with the Department of Education’s draft regulations for ESSA implementation. Hirsh offers these recommendations to states and systems:

• Ensure that professional learning aligns with the definition of professional learning in ESSA.
• Plan all learning to support a coherent vision for student and adult learning.
• Identify the intended impact of any learning along with the data and evidence that will help educators know if they are achieving their goals.