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Stephanie Hirsh and Joellen Killion of the National Staff Development Council have written a must-read Education Week Commentary calling for far greater national commitment to professional learning.  Already in their first paragraph, they drive home a point Public School Insights has been harping on lately: namely, that recent education reform efforts have squandered much of their promise by focusing more on incentives (or disincentives) than on continuous support for excellent instruction.  Hirsh and Killion write:

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.

This, despite the rising tide of evidence that professional learning can help American schools outperform international rivals:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the right kind of investments in effective, school-based learning for teachers can have an enormous impact, and may well be the difference between lackluster achievement in the United States and the higher performance seen in foreign countries that have invested strategically in teacher collaborative learning.

In their commentary, Hirsh and Killion offer a concise and compelling description of effective professional learning:

In an effective professional-learning system, teachers meet on a regular schedule in teams formed because of common grade-level or content-area assignments and the collective responsibility members hold for their students' success. Learning teams follow a cycle of continuous improvement that begins with examining student data to determine the areas of greatest student need, pinpointing areas where adult learning is necessary, engaging in study to address these needs, developing powerful lessons and assessments, applying new strategies in the classroom, reflecting on their impact, and repeating the cycle as necessary.

To learn more about effective learning systems, see the National Staff Development Council's Standards for Staff Development.  NSDC is a member of the Learning First Alliance, which sponsors Public School Insights.