"Professional learning that increases educator effectiveness and results for all students occurs within learning communities committed to continuous improvement, collective responsibility, and goal alignment."

Effective learning communities engage in a cycle of continuous improvement involving each of the following steps:

• The use of data to determine student and educator learning needs
• Identification of shared goals for student and educator learning
• Professional learning to extend educators' knowledge of content, content-specific pedagogy, how students learn, and management of classroom environments
• Selection and implementation of appropriate evidence-based strategies to achieve student and educator learning goals
• Application of the learning with local support at the work site
• Use of evidence to monitor and refine implementation
• Evaluation of results