Why has professional learning been important in your work? Ultimately, everything we do in education comes down to high-quality teaching. When I was at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we called it effective teaching. No matter what you call it, it’s at the core. Even though political and social forces may shift the focus sometimes, the pendulum will always swing back to high-quality teaching. For example, when I was [co-executive director] at the School Redesign Network at Stanford University, it was around the time that the No Child Left Behind Act heightened the importance of test-based accountability measures in literacy and mathematics. But the critique of that approach was also emerging. The work of our team was to figure out how to align and