I recently looked in on a Facebook exchange among some teacher friends. It was the day before their students were to arrive for the new school year, and they were bantering about the opening day of schoolwide professional development sessions. When one of them commented, dripping with sarcasm, that she wouldn’t want to oversleep and miss something important, the others responded with knowing laughter, Facebook style. These same teachers spent the previous week in collaboration, examining benchmarks and preparing for improved instruction, and I hope that they found that useful. However, as Dennis Sparks pointed out in a recent blog post, hope isn’t a strategy. “Hope must be supported by stretching goals, robust plans, professional learning, and strong teamwork,” he writes (Sparks, 2013). This issue of