Conclusions and Recommendations

Incorporating micro-credentials into educator professional development and advancement systems can help refocus these systems’ role in recognizing growth and overall quality of teacher practice and related student outcomes.

While MCs are primarily focused on the assessment of competency, high-quality MCs have significant potential to improve the quality of PD, and hence, the quality of instruction, by:

• Making it more relevant by identifying and targeting personalized areas for growth
• Providing resources that draw upon the best available research and evidence of impact for a given competency
• Promoting greater engagement and satisfaction with professional learning by increasing teacher agency
• Promoting learning by doing
• Providing feedback on practice and opportunities to learn from mistakes
• Modeling best practices in teaching by following an inquiry-based learning and feedback process

MCs also offer significant potential in allowing teachers to showcase their skills and advance professionally regardless of experience level or degrees held. MCs can help attract and retain highly talented teachers by formally assessing and recognizing previously unrecognized skills and providing opportunities for increased responsibilities related to those skills, along with compensation in line with those responsibilities.

However, it is too soon to say with certainty whether MCs will fulfill this potential. This is in part because most systems have not had MCs in place long enough—or at a broad enough scale—to assess impact. And measuring the impact of MCs broadly is difficult due to the wide variation present in current offerings and approaches, not only in their approach to assessment, but also in the depth and specificity of the resources presented.

When educator MCs were initially introduced, most were not attached to high stakes, such as advanced roles or license renewal. As the applications and aspirations of MCs become more ambitious, their quality must keep pace. In order for MCs to reach their full potential, education leaders must come to consensus about what high-quality MCs are and are not. States, rather than LEAs, should establish quality standards for MCs’ assessment components so that MCs can be recognized as holding consistent value regardless of location of employment. Ideally, there would be a nationally accepted definition of quality for MCs—and potentially an external, unbiased reviewer (like Consumer Reports)—so that MCs could be portable between states as well.

Conducting additional research on how to ensure MCs are valid and robust measures of teacher competence, and assessing the impact of MCs on teacher practice and student outcomes, should be a key focus for education policymakers and philanthropies as more state and local education agencies implement MC initiatives. In the meantime, the lessons and best practices detailed in this report offer a clear starting point for determining quality offerings and approaches.

State and local leadership can demonstrate that it understands and supports the elements of high-quality PD, and the integration of MCs into an effective professional learning and advancement system, by ensuring that:

• Any PD opportunities, whether connected to MCs or not, are aligned with professional learning standards and the federal Every Student Succeeds Act’s definition of high-quality PD. In many cases, the state will have greater capacity and resources than a regional or local entity and should harness these to develop high-quality teacher development opportunities, both with and without MCs. For example, states can provide guidance to instructional leaders for how to effectively embed MCs into collaborative structures like PLCs and tools for development such as individual professional growth plans. States can also leverage regional education service agencies as partners in the work.
• Systems are in place to help determine which educator PD opportunities and elements produce the best return on investment (ROI). ROI should take into account both the success rate in helping teachers earn MCs on related competencies, and a longer-term assessment of how instructional practice and student outcomes change.
• The design and implementation of MC policies and systems is careful and iterative. Determine what success would look like for the given objective and work backward. Collaborate with stakeholders early in the policy development process to address concerns and incorporate their ideas. Policies should start small and phase in gradually over time, analyzing data and stakeholder experience to address issues as they arise.
• The design of any human capital policies that involve MCs, including any associated incentives, is clearly driven by the intended goal and application of the policy. It will be important to make policy design and implementation choices that align with the intended objective(s). For example, there is a difference between using MCs for ongoing PD and using them for advancement: the former has the goal of growing skill in one’s current role, while the latter has the goal of validating skill for entry into a new role. As a result, two different approaches to incentives and currency are necessary to effectively motivate the desired behavior, and support educator success in attaining the desired outcomes. See companion Model State Policy Guide for further details.¹
• A system is developed to rigorously vet and convey the quality of MC offerings. The value that MCs hold must be investigated and assured through formal processes. The market is not a sufficient quality control mechanism, as popularity does not necessarily translate to effectiveness. Quality guidelines should be consistent to ensure that an MC earned for one use (e.g., ongoing professional learning), could also meet requirements for another use (e.g., license renewal or advancement requirements).Ensuring digital badges or other documentation of MCs offered can be thoroughly explored and verified by potential employers is another key aspect that must be in place to ensure transparency around quality and allow for MCs to hold currency.
• Educators are provided with clear and frequent communication of what high-quality MCs are and how engaging in them could help them and their students. Use language that helps separate the MC itself (which, like any other credential, is what is earned upon completion of an activity that indicates the holder has knowledge and/or skills that should translate in the job market) from the process leading up to the earning of the MC. Clearly communicate that MCs are a tool that can promote the kinds of PD activities that align with evidence on best practices for adult learning, even if they are not PD in and of themselves. Also, make a clear distinction between MCs and digital badges, which may be perceived as faddish.² Even “competency-based” is not clear enough, as how institutions of higher education (IHEs) think about “competency-based education” and MCs is different from how K–12 has approached and defined them. This is something those in the field need to continue to think through if IHEs are planning to play a role in the MC ecosystem.
• High-quality MC offerings are curated to align with educators’ and students’ needs. Educators should have some discretion in choosing what professional learning and/or advancement opportunities to pursue based on their own interests and goals. However, those decisions should be a “guided choice,” scaffolded within a set of options that will move school and LEA objectives forward as well. MCs for license renewal can be much more focused on school and LEA goals, while MCs as part of individual professional growth plans can allow for greater flexibility and personalization, while still ensuring a focus on better serving students. Curating a smaller set of vetted MCs for teachers to choose from also allows schools and LEAs to better support teachers throughout the process, and better enables teachers to collaborate toward meeting common individual and school goals. It also limits the burden put on state education administrators tasked with assessing the quality of MCs.
• Educators engaging with MC offerings are provided the quality and level of support necessary to succeed. Relevant high-quality related learning resources must be made accessible on a given MC competency relative to the prior skill and knowledge level of the teacher engaging in it. While this is a particular concern for novice teachers who already face a steep learning curve, it is true for experienced teachers as well. Other instructional resources, such as curricula, should reflect and not contradict the shifts in practice that high-quality MCs are requesting of educators. Educators also need sufficient quality and quantity of timely, individualized coaching and feedback and opportunities to collaborate with peers in a cycle of inquiry on the MC competency being pursued during contracted hours. Instructional leaders should learn about and experience MCs themselves in order to have adequate knowledge to guide teachers through the process. Educators in very small schools or LEAs and educators who are “singletons” in terms of role or subject matter should have access to virtual peer collaboration and coaching opportunities (sometimes via the MC platforms themselves). However, a broad-scale virtual approach is less likely to positively shift the overall professional learning culture within a given school or LEA.
• MCs are implemented as a tool for furthering equity rather than reinforcing current discrepancies in student access to quality teaching. An opt-in approach to MCs may lead to only the most well-resourced schools or LEAs being able to provide high-quality MC opportunities, leaving less well-resourced ones, and the students they serve, further behind. One way state and regional education agencies can help support equitable MC implementation efforts is by recruiting a representative sample of LEAs to participate in the first phase of any initiative, and offering additional resources to high-need LEAs to assist with implementation. Resources offered to high-need schools should cover the added compensation for any new teacher leader roles, and for new positions in the event that a teacher leader will have to spend less time leading their own classroom. Providing this compensation will simultaneously help build a culture of collaborative professional learning and aid retention efforts in these schools.³ If possible, states should oversample from high-need LEAs to ensure a sufficient base size for data analysis and to focus funding and implementation support to the LEAs most in need as early in the rollout as possible.
• States, LEAs, and schools have full access to all of their MC data and use that data to inform ongoing policy and practice. Access to data enables a better understanding and harnessing of MCs’ potential. It can provide a deeper understanding of educator motivation and persistence related to various educator human capital policies, including those viewed as compliance (e.g., license renewal) versus personal growth and advancement. Data access allows for evaluation of the relationship between earning MCs and teaching practice and student achievement, including which aspects of or approaches to MCs appear to have the most impact. It can also help states and LEAs better target professional learning opportunities, and make smarter purchasing decisions, moving away from a “pay-per-service” mindset toward one that motivates MC issuers to improve the efficacy of their offerings.⁴

Like any specific tool to improve our K–12 education systems, MCs are not a silver bullet. The issues with both traditional PD offerings (the available tools, vehicles, and resources) and with professional learning systems (the structures, policies, and practices supporting and giving meaning to the PD offerings) are well-documented and long-standing. While our research finds that high-quality MCs have significant potential to positively impact the former, they will not be successful without significant shifts to the latter— particularly a culture and mindset shift from compliance to ongoing growth. Reaping success from MCs requires making bigger shifts to systems, rather than simply layering MCs on top of, or next to, policies and processes already in place. The elements of educator development and advancement systems may be less exotic than a novel digital tool but, left unaddressed, most educators will struggle to attain MCs, many schools will continue to struggle to retain good teachers and develop them into great ones, and students with the greatest needs will continue to struggle as well.

For more detailed recommendations on designing and implementing effective human capital policies incorporating micro-credentials, see New America’s companion brief, Harnessing Micro-Credentials for Teacher Growth: A Model State Policy Guide.⁵