Reach the Highest Standard in Professional Learning: Learning Designs

The right learning design can support professional growth!

Learning Forward is a leader in understanding and advancing professional learning that leads to student success. This series explores Learning Forward&rs

Eleanor―Ellie―Drago-Severson is Professor of Education Leadership and Adult Learning and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. A developmental psychologist, Ellie teaches, conducts research, and consults with team, school, district, and systems leaders―as well as teacher leaders―in public, charter, and private schools and systems. She supports professional and personal growth; leadership development for principals, assistant principals, teachers, schools, districts, and organizations; and coaching and mentoring in K–12 schools, universities, medical institutions, educational associations, and other adult education contexts both domestically and internationally. She is also an internationally certified developmental coach who partners with leaders to build internal capacity, lead on behalf of social justice, and strengthen capacity across their systems.

For more than three decades, Ellie’s teaching, research, and partnerships in the field have sought―synergistically―to explore and extend the possibilities of adult development and developmental leadership as levers for internal capacity building at the individual, team, organizational, and societal levels. Her work explores interconnected streams that focus on the connection between internal capacities and educational leaders’―broadly and inclusively defined―practice on behalf of growing bigger selves and helping others to do the same. She also takes a developmental approach to creating conditions that support our desires to thrive and support those in our care, as well as feedback for growth, the pressing challenges national and international educational leaders are facing and ways to help them manage these challenges, and leadership preparation and development. In addition, her work offers a new, learning-oriented model for leadership development; supports adult development in individuals and teams within and across systems; lifts leadership at the individual and systems levels; supports diverse adult English language learners and those who serve them; and grows teacher, principal, assistant principal and district-level leadership.

Consonant with urgent conversations about transforming teams, schools, systems, and society into more learning-inclusive and equity-oriented contexts, her work foregrounds how we can support leaders’ internal capacity building in schools, districts, organizations, and leadership preparation programs―and how these capacities inform the gifts leaders are able to give to those in their care, each other, and the world as they lead for social justice and strive to make the world a better place for all. Ellie loves opportunities to accompany educators and other leaders in their vital work―and never takes it for granted. Instead, she considers it a gift.

At Teachers College, Ellie is director of the PhD Program in Educational Leadership. She teaches aspiring and practicing principals in the Summer Principals Academy; aspiring superintendents in the Urban Education Leaders Program; and leaders from a range of for-profit, management, and consulting sectors in the Accelerated Education Guided Intensive Study (AEGIS) Program. She also coaches leaders in the Cahn Fellows Program for Distinguished Leaders and in her private coaching practice to help them grow―on the inside―and to grow their practice. In addition, she serves as faculty director and co-facilitator of the Leadership Institute for School Change at Teachers College.

Ellie is author of the best-selling books Helping Teachers Learn: Principal Leadership for Adult Growth and Development (Corwin, 2004) and Leading Adult Learning: Supporting Adult Development in Our Schools (Corwin/The National Staff Development Council, 2009), as well as Becoming Adult Learners: Principles and Practice for Effective Development (Teachers College Press, 2004) and Helping Educators Grow: Strategies and Practices for Leadership Development (Harvard Education Press, 2012). She is also coauthor of Learning for Leadership: Developmental Strategies for Building Capacity in Our Schools (Corwin, 2013), Reach the Highest Standard in Professional Learning: Learning Designs (Learning Forward & Corwin, 2014), Tell Me So I Can Hear You: A Developmental Approach to Feedback for Educators (Harvard Education Press, 2016), Leading Change Together: Developing Educator Capacity Within Schools and Systems (ASCD, 2018) and Growing for Justice: A Developmental Continuum of Leadership Capacities and Practices (Corwin/Sage & Learning Forward, 2023).

Ellie’s teaching, scholarship, and developmental approach to leadership foreground the power of growth, relationships, and interconnections―since these are essential to learning, development, individual perspective broadening, authentic collaboration, and capacity building at the individual, team, school, district, and systems levels. Her teaching, mentoring, and life’s work are inspired by her husband and soulmate, her parents and family, her relationships, her teachers, her own experiences as a middle and high school teacher, her experiences as a program director and teacher of adults, her work with leaders in the field, her coaching work, and―last but not least―her work with practicing and aspiring leaders in graduate programs and in the field. Taken together, these experiences form an interdisciplinary palette that is complemented by adult developmental theories and other life-changing frameworks.

Ellie’s work has earned awards from the Spencer Foundation, the Klingenstein Foundation, and Harvard University, where she served on faculty for eight years and was awarded the Morningstar Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Dean’s Award for Excellent in Teaching. Most recently, Ellie received three outstanding teaching awards from Columbia University. She earned degrees from Long Island University (BA) and Harvard University (EdM, EdD, and a postdoctoral fellowship). Ellie grew up in the Bronx and is deeply grateful for the ways that it―and the community that raised her―have shaped her life.  

Dr. Patricia Roy is a Senior Consultant with Learning Forward’s Center for Results. She works with state departments of education, districts, and schools across the United States as well as internationally. Most recently, she developed briefings and a resource guide to help schools use results from the revised Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI2) to improve professional learning. She has authored many articles and chapters on effective professional development,  school improvement, innovation configuration maps, and cooperative learning. In her work with Learning Forward, Pat developed professional learning resource toolkits for Georgia; Arkansas; and Rochester, NY. She co-authored with Joellen Killion, Becoming a Learning School and with Stephanie Hirsh, Joellen Killion, and Shirley Hord Standards into Practice: Innovation Configurations for School-Based Roles (2012).  For five years, she wrote columns about implementing the Standards for Professional Development for The Learning Principal and The Learning System, two Learning Forward newsletters.  She has also served as faculty for Professional Development Leadership Academy through the Arizona Department of Education. This 3-year program developed the knowledge and skills of school and district teams to plan, implement, and evaluate professional learning.  She has also served as the Founding Director of the Delaware Professional Development Center in Dover, DE. The Center, developed by the Delaware State Education Association, focused on school improvement for student achievement and effective professional learning. She also served as the Director of the Center for School Change in connection with a National Science Foundation SSI grant, a district coordinator of staff development, and an administrator in a regional educational consortium in Minnesota. Creating and improving professional learning so that it impacts student achievement is one of Pat’s passions.

Valerie von Frank has written extensively about education over several decades as a daily newspaper reporter in multiple states covering public schools and, over the last decade, for NSDC publications, including JSD, Tools for Schools, The Learning System, The Learning Principal, and T3. She is a former editor of JSD, worked as a daily newspaper editor, served as communications director in an urban public school district, and was communications director for a Michigan nonprofit school reform organization. She is co-author with Ann Delehant of Making Meetings Work: How to Get Started, Get Going, and Get It Done (Corwin Press, 2007). She is currently NSDC’s book editor and a freelance writer and editor.