Professional Learning Redefined
An Evidence-Based Guide
A Joint Publication with Learning Forward, Foreword by Diane Sweeney
You’ve just found your new comprehensive guide to designing powerful professional learning!
Maybe you’ve run out of fresh ideas to help teachers improve their instructional practice. Maybe you need some help to feel as though your PLCs, coaching and workshops are making an impact. You’ve picked up the right book!
Isabel Sawyer and Marisa Ramirez-Stukey have studied the research on effective professional learning from the past 25 years and distilled these findings into this practical guide for the numerous roles of educators charged with supporting teachers. Readers will learn to construct a multi-year implementation framework and also
- Facilitative techniques that support powerful professional learning
- Planning tools to shift instruction at the school and district level
- Functional characteristics of a successful facilitator able to combine content and context of learning
Full of protocols, strategies, and case studies, this book dissects the key components of professional learning, like coherence, connections, and content, and examines each through an evidence-based lens.
"This book provides a clear and practical understanding and approach to tackling the task of teacher learning at a time when “initiative fatigue” and “PD overload” are part of our everyday conversations. It allows us to pause for a moment, step back and examine our practices through a new lens. Professional Learning Redefined explains the “why” and the “how” of what we do."
"In this text, Sawyer and Stukey connect building knowledge, learning, and planning for adult audiences that goes beyond professional learning communities."
"In Professional Learning Redefined, the authors have created a book where outcomes are clear, and the steps are realistic and useful. I believe this book meets the need for a book on how to design professional learning."
"Professional Learning Redefined is an easy to use handbook that will help ensure that professional development is meaningful, relevant and connects back to student learning."
"Teachers have become complacent and bored with regular “trainings” because they don’t solve problems. This book will put that idea away and support learning to those who are in the classroom and who don’t have a process for solving problems. Collaborative learning will holds teachers and administration accountable for all children learning to the best of their ability and removes the “PD from hell” syndrome."
