Eleanor Drago-Severson's research, writing, teaching, and coaching has helped show that supporting adult learning and professional development improves outcomes for students. Given the mounting adaptive challenges educators face in education today, teachers and school leaders must continuously learn and grow as they manage these tremendously complex issues and programs and the ambiguity inherent in them. Drago-Severson's full essay explains how the Learning Designs standard helps educators prioritize these designs, as well as understand how to effectively support learning and improvement. The full essay looks at the three "big ideas," or strands, that comprise the Learning Designs standard. In this excerpt, she examines the first strand, which concerns the way learning theories, research, and models help us understand the adults we want to support.