How Do People Learn and Change? Why This Question Is Central to School Improvement

If you want to improve schools, you have to grapple with a fundamental question: How do people actually learn and change? It sounds philosophical, maybe even abstract. But the answer shapes everything; how you design professional learning, how you support teachers, how you lead improvement efforts. And yet, in most conversations about school reform, it goes unasked.

We want to name that gap and fill it. Because if your theory of learning is incomplete, your improvement efforts will be too.

Common Approaches (and Their Limits)

When educational leaders set out to improve instruction, they tend to operate from one of several perspectives, sometimes without naming it explicitly.

The first is a management perspective, the belief that if you give people clear enough direction, they’ll change what they do. Just tell teachers what good instruction looks like. Set the expectations. Monitor compliance. This approach treats learning like a simple input-output process: clear message in, changed behavior out. But anyone who has worked in schools knows it rarely works that way.

The second is a resource perspective, the belief that the right materials will do the work. Buy the curriculum. Adopt the program. Hand teachers the tools and trust that student learning will follow. Think of it like the Blue Apron model: if we just give people the right ingredients, they’ll cook a great meal. Resources matter, but teachers need more than materials handed to them or resources curated for them.

A third perspective focuses on content-free practices, identifying general teaching or leadership moves that apply across any subject or grade level. These frameworks aren’t without value, but when learning is stripped of content, it loses the specificity that makes it meaningful and useful.

Then there’s the train-the-trainer model, where a small group receives intensive learning and is then expected to pass it on. The problem? It’s like a game of telephone. Each layer of transmission waters down the original, and by the time ideas reach classrooms, they’re often unrecognizable.

Finally, some approaches incorporate sensemaking, recognizing that educators need to adapt new ideas to their local context. This is closer to how learning actually works. But even this can fall short if it stays individual rather than collective.

Where We Stand

Our perspective draws from what researchers call a situative view of learning, and it leads us to some clear commitments.

Learning is social. You don’t develop deep understanding by reading a manual alone. You develop it by working through problems with other people, hearing how they reason, and being pushed to articulate your own thinking. This is as true for teachers and principals as it is for students.

Learning is tied to context. What you learn, and how deeply you learn it, depends on the environment you’re in — the tools available, the norms of the group, the problems you’re actually trying to solve. Generic learning experiences, removed from the real work, rarely stick.

Learning is about becoming. This might be the most underappreciated insight. Learning isn’t just accumulating knowledge. It’s gradually taking on the identity of someone who can do the work. A teacher becoming a skilled facilitator of mathematical discussion. A principal becoming an instructional leader. This kind of growth takes time, community, and repeated practice.

So when we ask what kinds of learning opportunities schools and districts need to create, we’re guided by four beliefs:

1. People are sensemakers. They need structured opportunities to wrestle with ideas — not just receive them — and to connect new learning to their existing practice and beliefs.
2. People learn in community. Grappling with challenging problems alongside colleagues creates the conditions for collective understanding that no solo professional development can replicate.
3. People need to think with others. Critical connections get made when you can hear how someone else reasoned through a problem, not just what answer they arrived at.
4. People need to practice deliberately. Understanding an idea is not the same as being able to use it. Educators need time and support to try things out, reflect, and refine.

These aren’t just abstract principles. They’re the foundation for every decision we make about how to design learning — for students, teachers, and leaders alike. When school improvement efforts skip this foundation, they tend to produce activity without transformation.

The question of how people learn is too important to leave implicit. We think it’s worth getting explicit about — and then building everything else on top of it.

The ideas in this post are influenced by the following scholars: Hilda Borko, Anders Ericcson, James Hiebert, Lev Vygotsky