Stephanie Hirsh shared information about the impact of professional learning with attendees of the 2014 LF KS Learning Conference, but she didn't come with all the answers. To begin her keynote address, Hirsh asked attendees to form groups of three and provide their top answers to the question: Why Does Professional Learning Matter?

Several ideas about professional learning surfaced from those participant responses, including:

• Professional Learning inspires and rejuvenates.
• It increases educator effectiveness to have better results for students.
• It builds a culture of collaborative accountability.
• It builds leadership for a school or improves the quality of leadership.
• We want everyone to be better.
• We don't know everything we need when we get out of college.
• We continue to grow.
• We have a culture for improvement.

What evidence do you use?
Hirsh encouraged educators to use multiple data points. She said it can also be helpful to identify an implemented program that is successful, suggesting the Bentwood story in Chattanooga, TN as one example.

A "Shift" in Professional Learning
Hirsh shared that schools and districts often need to make some shifts in their professional learning in order to increase its impact. Shifts to consider are:

• Instead of being driven by educator preference, we need to look at what does the data say.
• Instead of a focus on individual learning, we need to be more collaborative and have more teams learning from others.
• Instead of a large group format and one size fits all, we need to move to small focus groups with differentiation.
• Instead of low expectation or lack of support for application of learning, we need to move to high expectations of learning with coaching support and follow-up