In this article, the author discusses content focus and coherence, which are fundamental to professional development that helps teachers boost student learning. Learning Forward's Outcomes standard emphasizes that teacher learning should be focused on subject-matter content and how students learn that content, and consistent with the individual, school, and district factors that shape teachers' work lives. Districts and schools can take several measures to foster content-focused, coherent professional development. The author's research on leadership and district roles indicates that districts can play a key role in organizing and aligning professional development with district priorities. For example, involving teachers in planning professional development helps ensure that it responds to their needs, concerns, knowledge, skills, and challenges. She also found that professional development tended to be more content-focused and coherent when districts used multiple funding sources to pay for professional development activities (a way of merging and integrating goals from multiple programs) and when they explicitly aligned professional development activities with state or district standards and assessments. District monitoring of activities and their effects through continuous improvement efforts was also related to better professional development.