Several years ago, I served on an advisory committee for Microsoft Partners in Learning, where I heard about the concept of the “big bet.” Microsoft placed big bets on investments promising the biggest returns. In 2007, NSDC (now Learning Forward) launched a strategic plan. The big bet that emerged as one of our strategic priorities was “affecting the policy context.”The board and staff shared an assumption that policy affects practice and that good policy could promote better practice. Impacting federal legislation is a huge undertaking. We began byclarifying what parts of thelaw we wanted to change. René Islas, our federal policy advisor, suggested we focus on promoting a new federal definition of professional development. The term professional development appears almost 200 times in the Elementary