Educator Micro-credentials

As states struggle to recruit and retain teachers, a nationwide scan examines how to strengthen teacher workforces via micro-credentials.

This brief draws upon its companion report, Harnessing Micro-credentials for Teacher Growth: A National Review of Early Best Practices, as well as New America’s previous work on educator micro-credentials, to outline a set of model policy proposals for states to effectively incorporate high-quality micro-credentials into educator policies and practices for ongoing professional development, license renewal, and advancement.

New America analyzed the national landscape of educator micro-credentials (MCs) to determine how to best harness their potential to more successfully attract, develop, and retain great teachers. We find MCs to be a promising alternative to more traditional (and largely ineffective), compliance-focused teacher professional development, as well as an effective vehicle for defining and determining eligibility for some teacher roles. Whether MCs will fulfill their promise will depend largely on the ability of education leaders to set an appropriately and consistently rigorous bar for quality in MC offerings, as well as to ensure sufficient and appropriate implementation processes and supports outside of the MC offerings themselves. To aid in these efforts, we summarize early best practices for ensuring quality MC offerings as well as lessons learned about the necessary conditions for teachers to succeed with MCs. As an added resource, New America has built a companion State Policy Guide with recommendations for policymakers looking to integrate MCs into their educator professional development, license renewal, and advancement systems.

A summary of key findings and recommendations from New America's report Harnessing Micro-credentials for Teacher Growth.

Below are answers to five of the most fundamental questions for understanding micro-credentials and how to leverage them to strengthen the educator workforce.

Below are answers to five questions that provide a deeper, and more technical understanding of how micro-credentials work and how to leverage them to strengthen the educator workforce.

Beverly Perdue and Myra Best explain why pursuing micro-credentials is a winning approach to promoting ongoing teacher development in NC.

States can help teachers incorporate new skills into their practice during the pandemic, and after, using micro-credentials as a tool.

Sometimes the education field takes inspiration from other fields to inform its approaches. The rise of educator micro-credentials is one of these instances. But the way that micro-credentials are being envisioned and used for educators is, and perhaps should, be different from its origins in the technology industry.

Policymakers need a way to ensure a sufficient level of quality in the design, assessment, and implementation of educator micro-credentials. Without these safeguards, the promise of micro-credentials to move educator policy toward a demonstrated competency approach will not be realized. These principles are a necessary first step to reaching that goal.

Insights into what teaching micro-credentials are, how they work, and considerations for states looking to allow MCs as one option for fulfilling teacher license renewal requirements (which are typically focused on professional development activities).

Micro-credentials stand out as an opportunity to foster a more culturally responsive teaching workforce.

Exploring how micro-credentials can be used to increase transparency and drive improvement in teacher learning, as well as recognize learning pursued through non-traditional pathways.

States’ use of micro-credentials for teachers is growing. This post summarizes a report exploring how and why, and offers cautions and recommendations for policymakers.

No Panacea identifies key obstacles that prevent professional development efforts from reaching their potential for growing teachers’ knowledge and skills in service of their students.

Rethinking Relicensure surfaces promising practices and potential pitfalls for replacing current compliance-oriented relicensure systems with models that attempt to assess the impact of professional development.

A task force convened by Council of Chief State School Officers and led by Digital Promise produced these principles to support the design, assessment, and implementation for educator micro-credentials so teachers can expand, validate, and receive recognition for their professional learning journey.

Center for Teaching Quality and Digital Promise shared questions for policymakers to contemplate as they consider incorporating educator micro-credentials as a tool to innovate within their education systems.

The Foundation for Excellence in Education posits micro-credentials could be a “game-changing” strategy for states to help teachers continuously improve their practice if they take thoughtful action.

The Micro-Credentials Partnership of States (MPOS) quality assurance rubric includes 29 components across 13 quality standards. The MPOS agreed that micro-credentials must meet every component to be considered high quality. This report provides an overview of the rubric development process and includes several resources to facilitate its use.

Creating a rubric that can evaluate the wide variety of competencies related to educator effectiveness requires a comprehensive design. As such, this rubric is not intended to measure the rigor of a given credential within its content area. Instead, the focus is on evaluating the characteristics of high-quality micro-credentials that apply regardless of the content of any individual micro-credential.

The Micro-Credentials Partnership of States (MPOS) Quality Assurance Standards provide criteria by which earners, developers, assessors, issuers, and recognizers can gauge the quality of a given micro-credential, establishing universal quality, portability, and value to educators across the nation.

Developed by experts and practitioners within the partnership, the MPOS Quality Assurance Standards include key quality indicators accompanied by a brief description of the standard. They also note responsible roles within the micro-credentialing process where applicable.

Attendees will learn what led to interest in micro-credentials as a way to strengthen educator knowledge and practice. The session will then shift to the key components, benefits and challenges of creating and providing micro-credentials, including how teachers are recognized for earning micro-credentials.

States' Implementation of Micro-Credentials (Kentucky Valley Education Cooperative Micro-credential Summit, August 12, 2020)