Still Learning: Strengthening Professional and Organizational Capacity

by Allison Rodman

This thoughtful guide offers a framework for creating and sustaining learning organizations where both students and educators can truly thrive. For years, schools have worked to ensure that students develop their social-emotional learning skills, which research shows can benefit not only students' well-being, but also their academic achievement. Until now, however, developing these skills in adults has not received the same emphasis in schools, despite evidence that they are just as helpful for advancing professional practice. With Still Strengthening Professional and Organizational Capacity , educator and author Allison Rodman, founder of the Learning Loop, seeks to correct this oversight so that teachers, administrators, and other school leaders can thrive both individually and collectively. Rodman offers a comprehensive "Framework for Educator Capacity Building" that sequences, defines, and outlines key concepts and strategies in five attunement, alignment, perspective, collective efficacy, and organizational learning. In this essential resource, you'll find * Protocols, checklists, reflection exercises, and myriad other practical tools for supporting educators' social-emotional development and strengthening professional and organizational capacity.
* Data and examples from decades of research into the benefits of and best practices related to capacity building.
* Lessons and insights from real-life educators.
* Recommended resources for further exploration. You'll also be able to access editable PDF versions of many of the tools and resources within the book to support and enhance your reflection, learning, and action planning. The evidence is Social-emotional development is a must not just for students, but for educators, organizations, and systems as well. Still Learning has everything you need to ensure that the adults in your school or district implement and sustain healthy practices to benefit themselves, their colleagues, and their students.

Genres: Education, Business

202 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2023

About the author

Allison Rodman is the Founder and Chief Learning Officer of The Learning Loop, an educational consulting organization that provides professional learning services to districts, schools, nonprofit organizations, and businesses internationally. This includes work with public, charter, and independent schools, over 20 archdioceses, and over 60 sites across the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific for the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA).

Allison is an ASCD Faculty Member and author of "Still Learning: Strengthening Professional and Organizational Capacity" (2023) and "Personalized Professional Learning: A Job-Embedded Pathway for Elevating Teacher Voice" (2019). Her work focuses on adult learners, and she has written for Educational Leadership on professional learning, effective teams, and educator wellness, as well as Education Week's Classroom Q&A and Edutopia.​

Allison brings experience as a teacher, instructional coach, school leader, director of teaching and learning, director of professional learning, and board member.

Allison designs, facilitates, and coaches professional learning that is personalized, purposeful, and paradigm-shifting. She is deeply committed to connecting learners together and sharing resources to personalize the learning process at every level of the system.

The goal of her work is to help adult learners:

- View learning as an ongoing experience (not an endpoint of one-time workshop)

- Strengthen their professional and organizational capacity

- Create deliberately developmental organizations.