Model State Policy Proposals

Goal

Create a human capital system that rewards teachers for taking on advanced roles while remaining in the classroom or in other non-administrative school leadership roles based on demonstration of competence in relevant skill areas, effectiveness, and overall fit.

Issue to Solve

Often, schools and local education agencies (LEAs) have no clear, consistent way to determine or assess the relevant skills needed for effective teacher leadership, so instead they rely on less impactful criteria, such as years of experience or advanced degrees to identify individuals for these roles.

Proposed Solution

The state should develop and pilot a list of clearly defined advanced teacher roles and designations that would bestow defined responsibilities, recognition, and rewards, including a significant bump to base salary. The goal should be to create a career lattice within the profession, as countries with high-performing education systems do,¹ that would have some applicability to all LEAs in the state. Specific MCs, or a series of MCs, could lend themselves well as an option for fulfilling some aspects of eligibility for advanced roles, or perhaps even full pathways to advancement.

Recommendations

A set of state-designed and approved descriptions of advanced teaching roles and the responsibilities necessary to attain them would help promote portability across LEAs. The state should start by assessing which roles and designations are going to have the most impact on students, in part by surveying LEAs and by looking at data surrounding the advanced roles/designations already available. It can also review research and data from other states and nations that have done work in this area.²

To determine the best approach(es) for demonstrating fit for a role, the state entity(s) responsible for educator talent and professional advancement must first identify the requisite skill set and expectations.³ In addition to being good practice, this approach will enable pathways to advanced designations to be delineated into required competencies that could be demonstrated using MCs. As part of this work, the state must also determine where earning specific stacks of MCs would locate teachers within such a career lattice, and ensure it makes sense relative to other roles in the system. The system should deprioritize master's degrees as an approach to recognizing teacher advancement in salary schedules, given that these degrees, as currently configured, have largely not been found to translate into improved teacher performance or student achievement.⁴

Some advanced teaching roles or designations could be attained by completing curated “stacks” of evidence-backed MCs that clearly match the responsibilities of the roles in conjunction with a behavioral interview vetting process that assesses the soft skills and overall fit for the role.⁵ Attaining these MCs would not necessarily require engaging in new learning, but could demonstrate skills teachers have developed over time, often on the job. Other roles and designations might be attained by demonstrating skill or effectiveness in other ways, such as National Board certification.⁶ Stakeholders (including but not limited to LEAs, school leaders, and teachers) would provide input in determining the curated list of teacher leader designations, roles, and related responsibilities, and how they relate to each other within the career lattice. The state should limit the number of roles, within reason, in order to ensure portability within the state. And it should commit to “hold harmless” educators who have previously attained advanced designations or roles via other avenues.

As part of this process, states should also recommend, and help fund, substantial increases in compensation for individuals who are hired into various leadership and other advanced positions that provide teachers with increased status without becoming an administrator.

Goal

Create an educator human capital system where there are explicit and distinct purposes for, and a clear separation between, PD that is required as part of ongoing license renewal, and the largely self-directed PD that happens as part of educators’ ongoing efforts to serve students as well as possible

Issue to Solve

Substantial behavioral science research indicates that the best way to incentivize employees to pursue experiences that will promote their professional growth, as well as the growth of their organization, is to give adequate compensation, time, and space to do their jobs…and nothing more.⁷ Once employees perceive a task they typically enjoy doing as something that they have to do, they begin to view their completion of the task as unrelated to their own desire, and instead as being in response to the requirement (or in the case of an external reward, in response to the “carrot” attached to the task).

States must revisit the true purpose and ultimate objectives of both license renewal and ongoing PD processes through this lens. Despite recent attempts by a handful of states to reimagine license renewal to be more closely related to teachers’ everyday work,⁸ it remains a high-stakes endeavor. License renewal requirements determine an individual’s ability to teach in public schools. And—because renewal requirements exist to ensure that educators can demonstrate that they continue to meet the minimum benchmarks a state deems necessary to teach—these should be the same for every educator holding a given license, not personalized to meet individual goals or preferences.⁹ Ongoing personalized PD, on the other hand, serves to help teachers strengthen their individual knowledge and skills in order to better meet the needs of the students they serve. Conflating these two distinct purposes and processes can undermine the culture and perceptions around ongoing personalized PD, by turning something that is intrinsically valued by most teachers into a compliance exercise.

Proposed Solution

As Cathy Stakey, an instructional coach at South Hamilton Community School District in Iowa explained, “there is a role for both ‘PD’ (professional development mandated to teachers) and ‘developing professionally’ (chosen by teachers)….Both are necessary [to achieve certain goals], and MCs could be a natural fit for both.”¹⁰ States should move to make the license renewal process and the ongoing PD processes distinct, and the way that MCs factor into each process distinct as well.

Recommendations for Designing License Renewal Policies and Processes

In most professions, license renewal processes are in place to ensure that those working in the field stay up to date with the latest research and evidence-based practice. The same should be true for educators. Licensure should be focused solely on those areas deemed by the state and LEAs as essential for addressing widespread gaps in educator skill and knowledge (often in burgeoning areas of research and/or need, like teaching in a virtual environment, promoting social-emotional learning, or engaging in culturally responsive pedagogy).

Such an approach keeps the focus of license renewal on ensuring that baseline skills and knowledge reflect the most recent, highest quality evidence and approaches, since renewal is a compliance-focused process. However, LEAs should play a key role in determining what the essential skills and knowledge are for their educators (with these skills being differentiated by role), with the state providing guidance and oversight.

MCs could be used as a tool to measure competency in these essential areas. Instead of placing value on the time spent engaging in license renewal activities, the MC process would place value on ensuring that individuals know and are able to incorporate key concepts and skills into their practice. When data highlight particular areas of practice to be ones of importance and/or need, the state might promote completing a stack of MCs in this area to build a stronger skill base, as Tennessee did, for example.¹¹ The list of MC stacks should not be static but should also not shift too quickly. A few MCs or stacks of MCs could be added or subtracted each year¹² as labor needs and research on best practices evolve.

A high-quality MC is a more rigorous approach to ensuring teachers are up to speed on the latest evidence and most impactful practices than most typical license renewal activities, such as attending a few unrelated workshops. As the field learns more about the criteria for high-quality, high-impact MCs, the state may consider associating differential and customized values to attaining different MCs, but for now the goal should be to have as many educators as possible begin to engage and benefit from them. To promote this goal, license renewal policies should allow a predetermined number of relevant, vetted, high-quality MCs to be used to fulfill requirements outright, without any conversion into credit hours. Creating a time-based exchange rate for MCs misses the opportunity for fundamental change, from time spent in a seat to the demonstration of competency—a change with the potential to positively shift the culture of professional learning as well as teacher practice and student learning.

High-quality MCs include an application and reflection process, which promote learning in and of themselves. As such, even teachers who are already skilled in particular competencies can benefit from MCs in a way that they currently do not with traditional sit-and-get workshops. A license renewal process incorporating MCs also serves to reward teachers who are early adopters of evidence-based practices, as those who already possess a given set of competencies will not have to spend the same amount of time on fulfilling relicensure requirements as those who were behind the curve.

States can also consider providing additional endorsements to teachers who go deep on one particular stack relevant to their students. For example, Delaware plans to take this approach with its 29 MCs across seven stacks focused on teaching early literacy.¹³

Recommendations for Designing Ongoing Professional Learning Policies and Practices

As Jennifer Carroll, activating catalytic transformation lead at Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, explained, “micro-credentials should be one tool in the teacher professional learning toolkit, not the entire toolkit.”¹⁴ While MCs provide a learning experience because they encourage educators to curate and reflect on evidence of practice, currently, most MCs are not designed with the primary goal of providing a deep level of initial training. Instead, MCs are primarily designed to assess a set of competencies through a process in which reflection and learning occur.

As a result, individualized professional growth plans (PGPs) that set goals for improvement and identify aligned development opportunities are a more appropriate tool for driving ongoing educator professional learning than micro-credentials alone are. These personalized PGPs can provide increased agency for educators and encourage them to seek out scaffolded professional learning that is responsive to the needs of the students and the context they work in, loosely following the approach taken by Georgia, for example.¹⁵

While MCs provide a learning experience because they encourage educators to curate and reflect on evidence of practice, currently, most MCs are not designed with the primary goal of providing a deep level of initial training.

Every teacher would be required to create a PGP and be presented with various options for how to fulfill them. However, the state would provide a small stipend¹⁶ if teachers successfully complete a relevant MC that is part of the state's curated database, as an incentive to put their learning into practice in fulfilling their PGP. Teachers who wanted to engage in a MC outside of that database could, but it would not provide the salary stipend. The state should provide an online form where teachers could share the rationale for engaging in a MC not in the database to fulfill their individualized PGP. This could be vetted to ensure quality alignment with other MCs available in the database and added if it passed muster.

Additional details surrounding the process for PGPs would have to be worked out based on available resources and capacity, as well as other policies and practices currently in place (e.g., who would be the PGP reviewer, how would teachers arrive at growth goals and work toward attaining those goals, how would they be pointed to relevant resources, etc.). But, done well, PGPs are a high-leverage tool that has the potential to promote teacher voice and choice while also moving toward a more goal-oriented approach to professional learning.