In most American schools, learning is designed almost entirely around children. The schedules, the spaces, the systems — all of it orients toward student instruction. But something crucial gets lost in this arrangement: the adults who do the teaching are often left out of the equation as learners themselves. When schools fail to invest in the ongoing intellectual growth of their educators, everyone pays a price.
The good news is that a different model exists, one in which schools function as genuine learning organizations for adults. In these schools, educators don’t just tolerate professional development, they actively enjoy it. They find meaning in the intellectual work of teaching, feel supported by a true professional community, and engage with colleagues in a process of continuous improvement. They have places to ask hard questions and get real answers. They receive help navigating the complex challenges of reaching every student in their classroom. This kind of school culture doesn’t happen by accident.
What the Research Tells Us
Organizational theorists like Michael Fullan and Peter Senge observed that schools functioning as learning organizations tend to develop shared cultures in which educators work together to build a common vision for their teaching and their work with students. When people are genuinely aligned around a shared purpose, collaboration becomes natural rather than forced.
Richard DuFour pushed this idea further, arguing that schools simply cannot produce students who are continuous, lifelong learners without teachers who model those same characteristics. In other words, school improvement isn’t primarily a structural problem. Instead, it’s fundamentally the work of building a learning culture among adults. If we want curious, resilient, growth-oriented students, we need to surround them with curious, resilient, growth-oriented teachers.
Seven Dimensions in Practice
In 2016, Kools and Stoll, working with other researchers, proposed seven dimensions that define schools as learning organizations. These dimensions offer a practical roadmap for school and district leaders who want to build something different.
The first dimension is developing and sharing a vision centered on the learning of all students. In our work in elementary mathematics, this means building a shared instructional vision around what high-quality math teaching looks like, something clear enough to guide decisions at every level.
The second is creating continuous learning opportunities for all staff. This learning should be job-embedded rather than pulled out of context, and coherent enough to allow educators (teachers, coaches, principals, or district leaders) to develop deep understanding of both the content and their specific role in supporting it.
Third is promoting team learning and collaboration. This means organizing learning so that individuals grow with and from one another, not just through one-on-one relationships. In our current work with districts, for example, a coach’s primary role might be to facilitate grade-level team collaboration rather than to work in isolation with individual teachers.
Fourth is establishing a culture of inquiry, innovation, and exploration. Former principal and Chief Academic Learning Officer Jessica Calabrese put it best: “You can’t look good and get better at the same time.” That statement exists to create permission to make mistakes, to experiment, to try something new and analyze what happened. Experimentation signals inquiry, and inquiry is how practice actually improves and is innovated on.
Fifth is establishing embedded systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge. Inspired by the work of Japanese educators, surfaced through researchers like Jim Hiebert and Catherine Lewis, this means finding ways to make the analysis of teaching public, storable, and verifiable, so that insights can be built upon rather than lost. In our current work, we are creating annotated lesson plans from high quality curricular materials that teachers can return to year after year to remind themselves of the critical learning goal and how students engaged with it.
Sixth is learning with and from the external environment. Many school and district leaders recognize when they’ve reached the limits of their internal capacity. Partnering with external support gives them opportunities to bring in new ideas and ways of thinking together.
Seventh is modeling and growing learning leadership. Jessica Calabrese, mentioned above, intentionally positioned herself as the Lead Learner in her schools, publicly demonstrating what it looks like to be vulnerable, take risks, and learn from collective analysis of teaching. When leaders model learning, they give everyone else permission to do the same.
The Bigger Picture
The authors of Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning remind us that when teachers thrive, students thrive. Teachers are our most valuable resources in schools. Taken together, these seven dimensions point toward something ambitious: schools where the adults are as engaged in learning as the students. At the heart of this work is a question worth sitting with: How do we create schools as learning organizations for educators, and how do we scale that vision across entire districts? The answer will requires intentionality, patience, and a willingness to reimagine how we can also center adult learning in schools.
The ideas in this post are influenced by the following scholars: Jessica Calebrese, Richard Elmore, Jim Hiebert, Marco Kools, Catherine Lewis, Peter Senge, Louise Stoll, and the authors of Learning Together.
The Evolving Educator: 
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