Making Every Educator a Learning Educator

By Stephanie Hirsh & Joellen Killion

For nearly a decade, efforts to raise student-achievement levels have been mostly about driving standards through the schoolhouse door. Accountability has meant putting pressure on educators to raise performance. But ensuring that educators have the necessary skills, knowledge, and tools to help all students achieve has not been approached with the same urgency. A concentration on minimal standards for teacher quality and the continual underinvestment in proven approaches to help educators do their jobs more effectively have made it almost impossible for teachers and principals to bring all students to proficiency, as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Today, about two-thirds of schools and school districts are invested in a system of professional learning that hinders, rather than promotes, great teaching for every student, every day. Common policy and practice focus on individual professional learning, rather than team-based and schoolwide learning; on increasing the number of staff-development days, rather than restructuring the workday; and on isolated professional-development plans, rather than those that are embedded in school and district improvement plans. This approach ensures that only some teachers and their students benefit, not all teachers and all students.

Moreover, too much of the debate about improving teaching is focused on improving preparation, rather than improving practice. Yet more than two-thirds of the current teaching force entered the classroom before the introduction of more-rigorous standards. Only on-the-job staff training for both new and veteran teachers will deliver significant...