Educators build their capacity to design and lead professional learning that serves each educator and respects all aspects of their learning needs. Educators recognize that high-quality professional learning can serve as a lever to achieve excellence, but only when educators and students have access to and opportunity for rigorous and relevant learning. High expectations, a welcoming culture, and sustained and aligned structures for professional learning are critical to ensuring that all educators and ultimately all students benefit.

Educators in positions of leadership at the school system level have primary responsibility and autonomy to establish conditions, structures, and cultures that ensure the effectiveness and impact of professional learning. Educators at all levels have responsibility and agency to contribute to professional learning’s effectiveness by how they engage, apply what they learn, and make explicit their expectations for themselves, their peers, and the leaders who support them.

Here are the main constructs of the Learning Foundations standard.

Educators establish expectations that everyone will learn. 

Educators make explicit their expectation that professional learning is a lever for improved learning for all. They communicate how professional learning leads to educators’ increased capacity to ensure that each student experiences rigorous learning at grade level. They articulate the connection between educators’ access to high-quality professional learning and students’ access to high-quality learning. They raise awareness about how student learning benefits from educators’ professional learning.

In exploring and establishing systems that ensure effective professional learning that positively impacts students, educators build their knowledge about how policies at national, regional, provincial, state, and local levels impact education. To understand how professional learning can remove barriers to learning and achievement, educators explore how education is funded and how that connects to other aspects of society, including health care, childcare, housing, and the workforce.

Educators contribute to professional learning systems that dismantle barriers to learning, applying their knowledge to ensure that structures, policies, and norms are not impediments to learning for any educators or students. For example, district leaders may publish an expectation that external providers’ professional learning aligns to the system’s articulated commitment to improved outcomes for all students.

Educators create structures to ensure access to learning.

Educators create and sustain structures to implement and integrate their expectations for participation and engagement throughout a professional learning system. Structures that impact professional learning include human resources policies and practices, resource allocation, data use, and decision-making processes at all levels of the school system. System leaders have a particular responsibility to leverage district-level structures to create conditions that sustain meaningful and relevant professional learning for all educators.

System leaders build their capacity to be strategic about educator and leadership development programs, pipelines, and networks designed to establish and maintain a strong workforce, building on what is known about effective development programs in general, including the research about teacher leadership and principal pipelines. System leaders become knowledgeable about the importance of developing and retaining the educator workforce and the resulting benefits that accrue to all educators and students.

Educators are responsible for ensuring that data systems, platforms, and practices are used to identify gaps in learning opportunities. They build their expertise about using data to support their and their peers’ identification of specific student and adult learning challenges and then take aligned and sustained action based on that data.

Educators investigate how the allocation and use of resources including money, people, time, and materials is linked to achieving their shared goals to create powerful learning experiences for each educator and student.

Through the structures they establish, system leaders make the day-to-day work of planning, facilitating, and engaging in professional learning meaningful and relevant for all educators. Other learning leaders at the school and district levels have a responsibility to leverage those structures, assess whether they are supporting the system goals, and demand improvements when necessary.

Educators sustain a culture of support for all staff.

Educators recognize that school culture and system culture are as important as structures and policies in promoting growth for each educator and student. Supportive professional cultures improve teachers’ and leaders’ satisfaction and retention.

Educators prioritize establishing trust among staff, students, and community members. They learn about the factors that contribute to creating productive relationships and examine how their and their peers’ actions establish trust. They recognize that trust is critical to sustaining the conditions that encourage open dialogue about difficult topics.

Educators examine how and what they learn, considering how the content and the way they engage with that content build their capacity to serve each student. They learn to support their colleagues by inviting educators at all levels to voice their needs, insights, and concerns.

Educators insist on a wide range of representation on decision-making bodies and in conversations. Educators purposefully invite ongoing feedback about the professional learning culture to ensure all learners have voice and safety to grow as individuals and in their teams.

Educators study and use assessment and monitoring systems to audit their professional learning system and ensure it delivers on its vision of learning for all. They regularly and publicly celebrate their successes and acknowledge where they are falling short. They learn to hold themselves accountable to their high expectations and make adjustments to make progress toward the goals they share for the system.

Selected research

Gates, S.M., Baird, M.D., Master, B.K., & Chavez-Herrerias, E.R. (2019). Principal pipelines: A feasible, affordable, and effective way for districts to improve schools. RAND Corporation. wallacefoundation.org/report/principal-pipelines-feasible-affordable-and-effective-way-districts-improve-schools-feasible

Grissom, J.A., Egalite, A.J., & Lindsay, C.A. (2021). How principals affect students and schools: A systematic synthesis of two decades of research. The Wallace Foundation. wallacefoundation.org/principalsynthesis.

Jensen, B., Sonnemann, J., Roberts-Hull, K., & Hunter, A. (2016). Beyond PD: Teacher professional learning in high-performing systems. Learning First and National Center on Education and the Economy. weleadbylearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/BeyondPDDec2016.pdf

Johnson, C. C., & Fargo, J. D. (2010). Urban school reform enabled by transformative professional development: Impact on teacher change and student learning of science. Urban Education, 45(1), 4–29. doi.org/10.1177/0042085909352073

Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S.O., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J.A. (2015). Teacher collaboration in instructional teams and student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 52(3), 475-514. doi.org/10.3102/0002831215585562