This brief by the Aurora Institute highlights federal policy opportunities to improve and modernize professional learning and development for educators for competency-based education systems.

Three policy recommendations are identified: (1) diversifying pathways into the teaching profession, (2) catalyzing innovation to redesign teacher preparation, and (3) developing meaningful systems of assessments and evaluation. The brief also articulates specific policy actions for each recommendation, which include: increasing affordability and institute incentives to expand and diversify the teacher workforce, supporting innovation in teacher education to enable 21st-century learning, and helping states build balanced systems of assessments to support 21st-century learning.