Principal Wilma Culton's professional development in the last few years has had her setting out for Singapore, conferencing in Canada, and bopping over to Berlin to check out what experts and the best educators around the world know about helping kids learn. The head of a primary school just outside Melbourne, Australia, Culton is a prime example of the State of Victoria's emphasis on improving education by looking to the world for answers -- and its own people to learn them. "The government encourages us to reach out and look at global trends and context," Culton said. "We are assisting students who will be living in the future, not the past. We need to look at things globally." For the past decade, Victoria's blueprint has put human capital at the heart of its plan for improvement. Investing in educators' professional learning and benchmarking student achievement against the highest-performing nations in the world are hallmarks of that effort.