Sustainability is an important but often elusive goal in educational improvement. Too often, even successful initiatives follow a predictable pattern: They begin with great promise and enthusiasm only to fade away after pilot projects and initial trainings end, funding runs out, or leaders move on to new roles. These challenges aren’t new, but they seem especially acute right now with the expiration of COVID relief funds, the threat of cuts to the federal education budget, and decreasing student enrollment trends that result in less per-pupil funding. What is an education leader to do to ensure successful long-term professional learning?

While financial resources are part of the equation, sustainability isn’t solely about money. In fact, focusing exclusively on funding can obscure other critical factors. In our work, my colleagues and I have found six strategies that are usually present in successful long-term professional learning initiatives — and missing in efforts that start off with potential but fall by the wayside. Although some of these strategies can get a boost from financial resources, they don’t necessarily take dollars to implement and may actually help leaders secure additional funding.

1. Ensure the quality of your initiative.

It may sound obvious, but it bears stating explicitly: Quality matters. Putting resources into initiatives or practices that don’t work is not only wasteful but can be detrimental to staff morale and decrease buy-in for future efforts.

It can be tempting to continue down a longstanding path without questioning its effectiveness, especially when the initiative was started before you or your system’s leaders were involved. Think about your school or system’s policies and practices and ask yourself: Do you know the rationale for and the effectiveness of all of them? We often hear educators say things like, “We’ve always done it this way,” or “No one has ever complained about this session.” It’s important to dig deeper and understand whether and how your practices and policies are connected to evidence and data.

Professional learning should be aligned to your system’s strategic priorities and goals and be informed by multiple sources of data. Documenting quality and effectiveness is essential for securing the resources, financial and otherwise, to continue the work. A wide range of strategies for measuring implementation and outcomes is provided in recent issues of this journal, including the April 2025 and February 2024 issues.

2. Engage in continuous improvement cycles to make mid-course corrections.

Sustainability doesn’t mean doing the same thing in perpetuity. While continuity is important, rigidity is the enemy of effectiveness. Making high-quality efforts sustainable for the long term requires adapting to changes such as evolving student needs, teacher turnover, changes in school structure, and changes in local and state policies.

Continuous improvement cycles are an excellent way to monitor implementation and outcomes, test adaptations, and make midcourse corrections as needed. For example, over the last two years the leadership team in Pasco County, Florida, a member of Learning Forward’s Leadership Team Institute, developed a problem of practice to increase student engagement practices in middle school classrooms. They developed iterative feedback cycles among teams of teachers to monitor and assess these practices and student engagement. They saw impressive gains in student problem-solving on formative assessments.

Continuous improvement cycles can occur in many different ways, including the frequently used plan-do-study-act (PDSA) model. What’s important is that they create iterative feedback loops that involve stakeholders at many levels and in many roles. Cycles should be visible, widely understood across the system, and open to input from many voices including those who have not had a seat at the table in the past.

3. Clearly communicate the specific vision, knowledge, skills, and mindsets necessary for long-term success.

Starting with the end in mind is a core principle of effective planning. Everyone involved in the initiative needs to have a clear vision of the intended outcomes and successful implementation. They should have consistent answers to these questions: What does success look like in five years if this effort is sustained with high quality? What will it look like at the end of the first year if we are on the road to long-term success?

Of course, vision is not sufficient — it needs to be backed up by know-how. A vision without action is just an idea, not a meaningful change.

A helpful framework for articulating the set of competencies educators should have is KASAB: knowledge, attitudes, skills, aspirations, and behaviors (Killion, 2017, 2024). Knowledge and attitudes, or mindsets, about the initiative are important for building buy-in and clarity about the strategies to be implemented. Cultivating knowledge and supportive mindsets is not a one-time activity, especially because schools always have new educators coming into the system. Everyone involved in the work also needs to have skills and behaviors that embody the mindsets and put the vision into action.

Newark Charter School in Newark, Delaware, is an example of a successful effort to articulate all these factors. The school developed a Portrait of a Leader that clearly spells out the skills, behaviors, and mindsets needed to be an effective leader on their campus. This portrait is now being used to recruit aspiring leaders as well as inform professional learning for current leaders at all levels in their system.

4. Articulate nonnegotiable strategies and flex strategies.

Making long-term change is usually a complex, multistep process. Different stakeholders may have varied roles in making it happen and their specific steps may change over the life of the initiative due to evolving student needs, the stage of the work, and myriad other factors. It’s important to be clear about the elements that are absolutely necessary and nonnegotiable at every stage of the work. Leaders should look to research in the field and data in their own systems to determine what those nonnegotiables are.

It’s also helpful to articulate additional components that are flexible: beneficial and good to have, but not likely to make or break the initiative. Providing a menu of these flex strategies can help stakeholders evaluate their usefulness and feasibility over time and promote ownership, buy-in, and creativity. Some items are likely to be more relevant and doable in some years than others. Applying them as a supplement to, not a replacement for, the nonnegotiable strategies ensures the initiative stays on course and that changes over time are additive and beneficial.

An innovative example of this mix of nonnegotiable and flex strategies can be seen in the Delaware Department of Education’s teacher and principal recruitment and retention network for district teams. As nonnegotiables, each district team addresses six evidence-based domains detailed in a district self-study guide designed in collaboration with Learning Forward. The domains focus on educator well-being and growth opportunities and include fostering relationships with teacher and leader preparation programs. In addition, each team develops a set of district-specific recruitment and retention strategies as the flex component. This combination provides districts with structure and guidance while ensuring that local and personalized strategies can be implemented with integrity.

5. Develop an inclusive and varied design team that is representative of all stakeholders.

Successful long-term efforts have many stakeholders’ input and buy-in from the beginning. Including many voices and perspectives helps ensure the initiative is relevant to the community’s needs, surfaces and addresses potential challenges, and encourages creativity and expansive thinking. By making everyone feel heard, leaders and partners build broad support for and ownership of the work.

Including many stakeholders from the beginning also builds a cadre of champions and early adopters. When these people show their support, advocate for the work, and demonstrate early wins that make a difference for students, they encourage others to join in, try it out, and add their own voices of support so that adoption and commitment snowball. This kind of broad-based support and implementation become part of the routines and habits of educators at all levels, which helps the work continue even when leaders or system structures change.

The Ohio State Board of Education leads an Educator Standards Board comprising 25 educators (teachers, principals, superintendents, and higher education leaders) who meet regularly to review and revise different sets of educator standards, including the Ohio Standards for Professional Learning. This structure ensures educators at all levels have a voice in setting state policy and professional practices.

6. Create policies that are turnover-proof.

When an initiative is high-quality and built with the support of stakeholders across the system, it is worth the effort to institutionalize it through policies that ensure resources, guidance, and accountability. This is particularly important for sustaining initiatives in the face of leadership changes. Leadership turnover is an unfortunate fact of life in education, and it can put some initiatives at risk if they are closely tied to specific leaders and not institutionalized in other ways.

Policies often require specific legislative actions, whether at the local school board level or the national policy level. Building high-quality professional learning through those systems helps to solidify its future, because it would take a major legislative effort for a new district or state leader to remove the standards or change course.

For example, the Missouri Department of Education was successful in getting a statute passed by the State Board of Education several decades ago that provides annual, recurring state funding to each district for professional learning aligned to districts’ strategic plans.

As another example, many states and districts have built the Standards for Professional Learning (Learning Forward, 2025) into education regulations, requiring that professional learning align with the research-backed definition and components of quality.

Connecting today’s needs to tomorrow’s goals

Designing professional learning for the long-term might seem to be of secondary importance to meeting schools’ immediate and urgent needs. But short-term change has limited benefits at best and is counterproductive at worst. Designing and implementing for sustainability connects today’s needs to long-term goals. By balancing continuity with adaptability, educators can ensure not only that their efforts will continue, but that they will benefit students today, tomorrow, and in the future.

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