The Learning Loop

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The Learning Loop The Learning Loop designs, facilitates, and coaches professional learning that is personalized, purposeful, and paradigm-shifting.

I partner with organizations and leaders to purposefully transform how they leverage limited time for professional learning that is personalized and paradigm-shifting. Allison Rodman is the Founder 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 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 support the whole learner to view learning as an ongoing experience and not an endpoint. This process includes learner voice, co-creation, social construction, and self-discovery.

The systems that free you are almost never the impressive ones.They are small and a little boring. The Friday reset that...
09/10/2026

The systems that free you are almost never the impressive ones.

They are small and a little boring. The Friday reset that clears your desk and your head. The first hour you refuse to give to email. The standing question you ask every team before you start. Nobody applauds them. They just quietly hold the week together. 💙

One simple question today:
🔒 What is one routine you protect no matter what the week throws at you?

Tell me in the comments. I want to build a list worth stealing from.

The urgent will always find you. The important needs a system to protect it.That is the quiet argument underneath this p...
09/09/2026

The urgent will always find you. The important needs a system to protect it.

That is the quiet argument underneath this piece by Robert Feirsen and Seth Weitzman. Using the Eisenhower matrix, they make the case that school leaders should spend most of their time on work that is important but not urgent - the instructional leadership and deep thinking that never announces itself with a ringing phone. Their point is that strong time management is mostly an act of subtraction.

🔗 https://edut.to/4gU3MYl

I would add one word to it: Routine. The important does not get protected by good intentions. It gets protected by a structure that puts it on the calendar before the calendar fills. A recurring block for the work that matters most is not a nice-to-have. It is the only thing standing between your priorities and everyone else's urgencies.

Calendar the important like the appointment it is. Then guard it like one.

We say we want professional learning that is focused, sustained, job-embedded, and personalized. Then we schedule it as ...
09/09/2026

We say we want professional learning that is focused, sustained, job-embedded, and personalized. Then we schedule it as a one-day event and wonder why it does not stick.

In Personalized Professional Learning, I wrote about a different move: "Find ways to bend time and space so our teachers can also be self-directed and empowered learners."

Bending time and space is not a metaphor for working more hours. It is the opposite. It means building the routines and structures that let learning live between sessions instead of only during them. A protected block. A recurring rhythm. A system that carries the learning forward so it does not depend on one heroic day on the calendar.

The right systems do not restrict teachers. They free them to be the self-directed learners we keep saying we want. 📗

https://amzn.to/2HdxvP2

Registration is open for a free leaders' webinar on October 7 - Time Is a Myth: The Systems That Give Your Teachers Thei...
09/09/2026

Registration is open for a free leaders' webinar on October 7 - Time Is a Myth: The Systems That Give Your Teachers Their Week Back.

Here is why I am giving it a full hour:

Most time-management advice aims at the teacher: Be more efficient, guard your calendar, learn to say no. But a teacher cannot out-discipline a system built to spend their time. The prep period interrupted four times, the meeting that could have been an email, the initiative added with nothing removed. That is not a willpower problem. It is a design problem, and design is a leadership job.

Wednesday, October 7, 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM ET
FREE - Bring your leadership team.

🔗 https://thelearningloop.info/webinar-2026-10

The most improvisational teachers I know are also the most routinized.It sounds like a contradiction until you watch a j...
09/09/2026

The most improvisational teachers I know are also the most routinized.

It sounds like a contradiction until you watch a jazz musician. They do not improvise by ignoring the key. They improvise because the key is so internalized it no longer costs them any attention. The structure handles the predictable, which frees them for the moment that is not.

We tend to frame routines as the opposite of freedom, and in schools we treat structure as the enemy of responsiveness. But an unstructured week is not a free week. It is a reactive one. Every recurring decision made fresh, until there is no attention left for the person in front of you.

The right routine is not a cage. It is the scaffold that holds the predictable steady so your judgment stays free for what genuinely needs it.

Look at your week. What are you deciding over and over that a routine could decide once? Protect that attention for the work only you can do.

Routines are not restrictions. They are what professional freedom is built on.

We keep trying to solve exhaustion by adding a strategy for it.A new platform to manage the old platforms. A meeting to ...
09/01/2026

We keep trying to solve exhaustion by adding a strategy for it.

A new platform to manage the old platforms. A meeting to organize the meetings. A wellness initiative layered on top of the very workload that is eroding wellness. Stephen Noonoo's piece in Edutopia names the alternative directly: A subtraction mindset. When a system is overwhelmed, you do not fix it by adding more to it.

https://edut.to/3UJt1oF

Here is where I land: Subtraction is not just a productivity trick. It is an act of alignment. Every time we add without removing, we tell our teachers that everything matters equally, which is another way of saying nothing does. Deciding what to stop is how leaders show what they actually value. ✂️

Before the next initiative earns a spot this fall: What are you willing to take off the plate to make room for it?

You do not have a time problem.I know how that reads at the beginning of the school year, when every calendar is already...
08/31/2026

You do not have a time problem.

I know how that reads at the beginning of the school year, when every calendar is already full and every teacher is already tired. Stay with me.

Everyone in your building has the same 168 hours this week. Time is the one resource handed out with perfect equality. So when we say there is not enough of it, we are usually saying something else: Our systems are aimed at the wrong things.

A system aimed at compliance will always feel like it is stealing time. A system aimed at learning gives time back. Same 168 hours, different design.

The structures that look like constraints are often the ones that set people free. Not more hours. Better alignment.

Before you add one more thing to the fall schedule, ask the harder question: What is this system actually aimed at?

Time is a myth. Alignment is the work.

I have been sitting on this news since early summer.It felt right to wait until we were all back in the rhythm of a new ...
08/29/2026

I have been sitting on this news since early summer.
It felt right to wait until we were all back in the rhythm of a new school year to share it.

I was appointed to a four-year term as Executive Director of the Advancing Leaders Collaborative.

If you came up through the ASCD Emerging Leaders program, you already know this community. The Advancing Leaders Collaborative grew from that network, and its purpose is simple: To keep educational leaders connected, supported, and growing long after any formal program ends.

That mission is personal for me. The leaders I met through this work did not just expand my thinking. They strengthened my capacity to lead, and they became the colleagues I still turn to.

So stepping into this role feels less like a title and more like a way to give back to the community that shaped me.

Learn more about the collaborative here: https://bit.ly/4zLwNxI

A real question for the leaders and facilitators here, because I think the answer is the whole game:What earns your teac...
08/28/2026

A real question for the leaders and facilitators here, because I think the answer is the whole game:

What earns your teachers' trust in a professional learning session, and what loses it in the first ten minutes?

Trust is earned when the room can tell you actually understand their week, when the examples are real, when someone who disagrees is treated as useful. It is lost when the session ignores what everyone already knows, when "collaborative" turns out to mean "listen to me," when their time is clearly worth less than the agenda.

So tell me: What is the moment a professional learning session earns you, or loses you? I will be in the comments. ✏️

Ten years of walking into other people's rooms taught me that trust is not given to the expert. It is given to the perso...
08/28/2026

Ten years of walking into other people's rooms taught me that trust is not given to the expert. It is given to the person who pays attention.

When I started in 2016, I thought credibility came from knowing the most. Read the research, build the best session, prove you belong at the front of the room. Some of that matters. But the rooms that went well were rarely the ones where I was most impressive. They were the ones where I listened first, and let what I heard change the plan.

I keep writing and sharing ideas about adult learning. The through-line is simple. Adults give their trust to learning that clearly sees them. Ten years in, that is still the skill I am most trying to get better at. Read the room. Earn it honestly. 💙

Address

509 West Crystal Lake Avenue
Haddonfield, NJ
08033

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Monday 8am - 4pm
Tuesday 8am - 4pm
Wednesday 8am - 4pm
Thursday 8am - 4pm
Friday 8am - 4pm

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+18046511498

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