When the COVID-19 pandemic moved teaching and learning to remote and virtual spaces, teacher professional learning moved online as well. To create consistently high-quality teacher learning opportunities, many online asynchronous approaches need improvement, and they need to be tailor-made for the online setting. That was the authors' goal when…

While there has been national attention to the crisis of retaining teachers, principal turnover is also high. In this artile, five education leaders highlight how principal supervisors can improve principals' job satisfaction and retention.

Part of the reason many districts fail to achieve the promise of high-quality professional learning is that they operate with what the authors call a "PD mindset." This mindset manifests in sporadic, one-time events, inservice sessions, guest speakers, webinars, and workshops that are not part of a larger plan or vision. The authors…

Many professions have long runways to leadership, with mentorship and increasing levels of responsibility. In contrast, the path to school leadership has historically not been well-defined. But that is changing. The role of assistant principals has become a major stepping stone to the principalship. Once thought of primarily as disciplinarians,…

The importance of dedicating time for teacher's professional learning is known, but dedicating adequate time for principals' learning and development is often neglected. The author recommends that superintendents take the following steps to guide their efforts to support principals' learning: (1) get to know principals as individual learners, (2)…

The authors have noticed, especially over the last few years, a growing number of urgent tasks and issues straining already overburdened educators. Instead of easing workloads, professional learning seemed to pile on more, leading to its abandonment. The trend in low implementation became clear as professional learning participants struggled to…

Systems, structures, and practices perpetuate disparities because they reinforce barriers that sort and separate students based on assumed success or failure. When students are disadvantaged in this way, the implicit message is that their learning doesn't matter. The counterpoint to these discriminatory systems is an asset-based approach, which is…

Curriculum is an essential but often underemphasized factor in quality teaching and student learning. One part of the problem is that teachers have few opportunities to learn about and practice with curriculum even when their districts have selected high-quality materials. Nearly a third of teachers have access to less than five hours of…

State education leaders and entities play vital, if not always highly visible, roles in establishing high-quality professional learning. Through legislation and regulations, resource allocation, leadership support, and more, they establish a vision of professional learning and support its implementation in districts and schools. In particular,…

Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning define and describe professional learning that leads to improved educator practices, leadership, and student outcomes. Standards draw on the latest evidence and research about what works in professional learning to help educators implement every phase of the professional learning process. They…

The goal of this meta-analysis was to examine whether there is a significant relationship between professional learning that is aligned to Standards for Professional Learning and teacher instruction and student achievement. Using a cutting-edge method called a mediation-meta-analysis, the authors were also able to examine whether changes in…

Research has been at the heart of Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning since they were first conceptualized and shared with the field in the 1990s. The standards are built on a decades-long foundation of research literature that describes the ways in which professional learning can improve educator knowledge, skills, and mindsets…

Standards for Professional Learning set the vision for high-quality professional learning by defining the content, processes, and conditions that lead to great teaching and learning for all students and educators. Learning Forward believes that all educators have a role to play in advocating for Standards for Professional Learning adoption and…

Most educators believe that social and emotional learning (SEL) skills are a fundamental part of good teaching and learning. Long before the pandemic, surveys showed that teachers believed these skills were essential for students to learn at school, and research confirmed that they are linked with measures of academic success. Educators need…

Tauheedah Baker-Jones is Atlanta Public Schools' first chief equity and social justice officer. She developed and now oversees the district's Center for Equity and Social Justice and the district's equity framework. In this article, she shares some of her experiences and learnings, as well as reflections on how districts can enable equity officers…