Spotlighting Student Assessment  Building Professional Development to Support New Student Assessment Systems Arabella Philanthropic Advisors, January 2011 Authored by Stephanie Hirsh, this white paper is one of several by noted authors on supporting development of comprehensive assessment systems for students and teachers. In her paper, Hirsh writes that new assessment systems will provide teachers with significant opportunities to guide all students toward college and career readiness. To benefit from such assessments, states will need to be more thoughtful than they have been in the past about conceiving, organizing, managing, implementing, and evaluating effective professional development. The paper offers eight recommendations to help rebuild professional development infrastructure to support these systems. Other papers in the series cover the Common Core State Standards, developing a strategy to