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For educators, "back-to-school" means slipping into familiar routines. There will be new students, new colleagues, and perhaps a new principal, but most teachers and administrators yearn for as little change as possible from the previous school year.?Change, after all, requires new accommodation, new learning, or new practice, each of which increases possibilities for discomfort, mistakes, or embarrassment. There is security in the familiar, even if it is the handmaiden of the status quo.

Educators also return to school with unspoken hope. They fantasize their students as more ready to learn or better behaved than those last year. They imagine a principal who will be more engaged and supportive (maybe there was a summertime conversion?).?Surely this year, they think, some colleagues will finally begin acting like part of the faculty. It is not just the need for a salary that motivates teachers to get out of bed during the first weeks of school. Whether they admit it or not, hope keeps them going.? ?

But self-serving hope that waits for other people to change does not improve teaching and learning. Change is a collective experience that requires participants to play one or more roles: advocate it, initiate it, support it, implement it, or accept it. For that process to begin, someone has to do more than hope; they have to change, moving from passivity to action.

Some educators will return to school this year hoping their professional development will be more relevant and useful than in the past. It isn't likely to happen unless the hopeful teachers and administrators take action. Here is how they can begin:

• Identify specific professional development from last year that teachers either did not learn from or did not use to improve their instruction. Meet with authorities responsible for organizing professional development to help them understand the marginal impact of the identified experiences.
• Ask the school principal to organize and lead a professional development roundtable that meets over time to review teachers' learning experiences and their impact on student learning
• Shift professional learning communities from conversation to authentic learning that causes teachers to improve their practice.
• Analyze test data to identify student learning problems teachers can address more effectively by engaging in sustained professional development.
• Organize subject- or grade-level peers into teams that use student assessment data to create professional learning experiences that improve instruction.
• Seek and use individual professional development, informal as well as formal that targets students' most critical learning difficulties.

Educators may regard even these modest suggestions as impractical given that some school leaders and faculties have a low tolerance for divergent thought, free speech, and new ideas. But as the new school year begins, every educator confronts the question of whether they will continue to passively accept professional development they know is ineffective. They may hope this year will be different, but unless they take personal responsibility for initiating change, this year will probably be more of the same.

Hayes Mizell is NSDC's distinguished senior fellow.