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Professional growth plans, while not a new approach to employee development, are rarely mandated as standard supervisory practice. This article offers a study of widescale mandatory implementation of professional growth plans (PGPs) in Canadian school systems, as an approach to fostering continuous professional learning. Reported benefits include greater employee commitment to learning; increased employee focus on purposes for their own development; increased collegiality; and employees' sense of self-affirmation. Tensions over control and direction, between organisational desires to guide employee development and professionals' desires for autonomy, need to be worked through. But with sufficient employee-supervisor trust, dialogue, flexibility, and patience, the findings suggest that PGPs motivate dialogue and questioning that energises collective learning and professional practice.