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"Traditional teacher professional development depends on external training handed down to teachers after having identified their weaknesses as a professional. If you're not so great at teacher writing, or if assessment is becoming a bigger focus in your school or district, you fill out a growth plan of some sort, attend your training, get your certificates, and repeat until you've got your hours or your school has run out of money to send you to more training. Oftentimes these "professional growth plans" are scribbled out in 15 minute meetings with your principal, then "revisited" at the end of the year as a kind of autopsy. What would happen if we flipped this model on its head? What if instead we created a teacher-centered, always-on, and social approach to teacher improvement? One that connected them with dynamic resources and human communities that modeled new thinking and possibility, and that crucially built on their strengths?"