Mention professional development to teachers and administrators and you are likely to get two different reactions. Teachers can find full-day sessions tedious and not tied to what they need to improve. Administrators struggle with trying to craft programs that meet the needs of teachers in all departments. But educators do agree on one thing: professional learning is a key tool to improving teachers' skills.
Yet despite the enormous amount of money spent in this area annually (an estimated $8 billion among the 50 largest U.S. school districts, according to the teacher-recruitment group TNTP), studies say the work misses its mark, sometimes badly.
A 2013 Center for Public Education report criticized the effectiveness of the workshop model, still a mainstay form of professional learning. Its "track record for changing teachers' practice and student achievement is abysmal." A recent study from TNTP, The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development, reached a similar conclusion: "We bombard teachers with help, but most of it is not helpful."
Teachers themselves frequently dislike inservice professional development. Although 84 percent participate in such training, only 20 percent of them were satisfied with the outcomes, according to the 2015 survey Making Professional Learning Count: Recognizing Educators' Skills with Micro-credentials by Grunwald Associates and Digital Promise.
This dissatisfaction has led to the growing popularity of a new type of professional learning that moves away from "seat-time." In 2014, Digital Promise, a congressionally authorized nonprofit organization, sought to bring teacher PD out of its funk by marrying two trends in education—the increasing use of video for learning and the idea of creating digital badges to prove competence in specific areas.
The group created a system of establishing microcredentials for teachers: The learning could come from videos, a colleague, or any other number of ways, but instead of being rewarded for PD seat-time, teachers would gain credentials by providing evidence they had applied the skills in their classrooms.
"We're agnostic about the way you learn something," says Karen Cator, president of Digital Promise. "It's very much competency-based learning."
Now an increasing number of teachers, districts, and even an entire state are getting into the act. Kettle Moraine, a small suburban Wisconsin district, rewards its teachers who earn pre-approved microcredentials with additional pay. The state of Tennessee is conducting a pilot program with PD company BloomBoard to pivot to competency-based learning for teachers. And while not offering pay, the Elizabeth Forward School District in Pennsylvania allows teachers to skip formal observations in exchange for earning microcredentials.
The ABCs of Microcredentials
"Microcredentials is an idea whose time has come," says Kettle Moraine superintendent Patricia Deklotz. "I would highly encourage superintendents and boards of education to look at [it as] an aspect of PD that is here to stay."
While others agree the concept has promise, they aren't ready to embrace microcredentials so quickly. "They are still in a relatively early stage of adoption," says Peter Grunwald, president of the consulting firm Grunwald Associates. "We know how [slowly] the education field changes."
But in just three years, the idea of microcredentials has spread rapidly. Some 35 organizations, including Embark Labs, RelayGSE (Graduate School of Education), and Educators Rising, now issue microcredentials. Digital Promise remains at the center of the movement, creating its own microcredentials but also overseeing and giving approval to badges created by other groups.
These credentials target specific skills—hence the "micro"—and tend to be grouped together in stacks that share a theme. For instance, the digital literacy stack from Digital Promise and BloomBoard includes 10 different credentials, ranging from "Designing and Evaluating Multiple Choice Items" to "Disaggregating Data" to "Analyzing Student Misconceptions."
Teachers choose which credential they want to pursue—an intrinsic motivational factor at the heart of the movement's success. This allows them to build competency in areas exactly when it's needed, says Cator. If, for instance, a classroom includes an autistic student or a large cluster of ELL students, instead of hoping that the school's inservice hits these areas, a teacher could seek out a relevant microcredential. "Personalization for teachers is as important as it is for students," Cator adds.
So how exactly does it work? In one example, "Checking for Understanding Using Gestures" from RelayGSE, the universal characteristics of effective checking for understanding are listed, as well as five ways to incorporate gestures. In addition to background information and strategies, the credential presents supporting research, such as books and articles. The submission requirements call for teachers to answer three overview questions and create a video that shows them using two distinct checking for understanding sequences.
Although every microcredential requires evidence of learning, the time needed to complete it and ways to submit the evidence can vary depending on the task at hand, the organization that created the microcredential, and the teacher's preference. Evidence can range from a lesson plan with scoring rubrics to student work samples to a classroom video or a teacher reflection. At this point, teachers don't have to pay to earn a microcredential, notes Digital Promise, but in the future, some microcredentials may have an assessment fee tied to them.
The Chicken and the Egg
Even though the Grunwald/Digital Promise survey on microcredentials is now two years old, the results show promise. Almost three-quarters of K–12 teachers said they independently sought informal professional learning outside of their school or district's traditional programs. Although just 15 percent of teachers said they were "somewhat familiar" with microcredentials, 31 percent said they were "extremely" or "very likely" to try this new model.
One result that surprised Grunwald is that many of the early adopters were not interested in recognition for these new skills, but more focused on their own learning. Cator explains that because most districts have no formal way of recognizing badges, some teachers learn new skills but are not taking the final step of supplying evidence to "earn" the badge.
"I don't need to show off badges on Facebook," one teacher commented in the survey. "I need to improve next week's lessons."
Yet many people, Grunwald included, think that as districts ramp up recognition of digital badges, the popularity of microcredentials will continue to grow. "It's one of the chicken-and-egg elements to this," he says. "Ultimately it will become more accepted by teachers and something they seek out, to the degree that districts and other employers adopt microcredentials as one of the things they are willing to consider."
A PLC Without Walls
If microcredentials are new to teachers, they are even newer to districts that may have to get board approval and collective bargaining changes to officially recognize this work. Kettle Moraine's Deklotz says that her initial interest stemmed from a reaction to Wisconsin's Act 10 legislation, which curtailed teachers' pay and rights in 2011.
Working with a teacher group in her district, the superintendent agreed to add between $200 and $600 to teachers' salaries for completing pre-approved badges. Although Deklotz saw this system as a way to reward teachers for gaining new skills, it also helped usher in personalized learning for students because teachers had the chance to experience it for themselves, she says.
About 80 percent of the district's nearly 300 teachers have earned a badge in the voluntary program so far. Deklotz considers it a success and notes a major unexpected benefit she's seen throughout her 10 schools—collaboration across buildings.
"It's like a PLC without walls," she says, as teachers use Twitter chats and Google Hangouts to work together on similar goals from different sites. Her district has scrapped its past PD efforts while pushing toward the microcredential model. "It's opened our eyes," she adds.
Although Deklotz is hesitant to attribute any student gains to microcredentials ("There are a lot of variables," she notes), she believes the new system has elevated teachers' perceptions of their role in the profession. "They are taking more active engagement in problem solving."
Treating Teachers Like Professionals
Assistant superintendent Todd Keruskin had an enviable problem in the Elizabeth Forward School District, located just 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh. "We had a struggle with our high-end teachers," he says. "It was hard to give them feedback."
Already a member of Digital Promise's League of Innovative Schools, the district of 4,500 students decided to experiment with badges this school year. "We struggle with developing a PD day for everyone," Keruskin says. To meet the needs of all teachers, "you can't just give [them] reading strategies."
To get teachers to try microcredentials, the assistant superintendent promised that those who participated could skip a formal observation. Roughly 60 teachers signed up, 10 in each of the district's six schools.
When Keruskin was with a group of 3rd grade teachers recently, he overheard them complaining about some of the tough microcredential requirements. But those complaints elicited focused, substantive conversations about the topic. The teachers traded notes about where the learning fell on the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition) model and offered each other tips on how to tweak their classroom lessons for better effectiveness.
"I loved every second of it," he says. They were talking at such a high level about lessons and helping each other out. "I told them, 'This is what every administrator would love to hear.'"
One feature about microcredentials is that teachers need to apply to be awarded the badge. Evaluators assess the evidence teachers submit and rule on whether they met the criteria. But even if teachers aren't successful with their first attempt, they get feedback from the credential evaluators about how to alter their instruction or evidence to prove their learning. Keruskin says that just one of his teachers was rejected twice while applying for a microcredential.
"Teachers think it's more work, and some are saying they would rather go back to a formal observation. But I think we are treating them more like professionals," Keruskin explains, because they have the freedom to pick which credential to earn and at what pace to do the work.
Vista's Innovation
Vista Unified School District in California is another trend-setting district with its own set of problems. Although Vista has been on the forefront of the open educational resources (OER) movement, it faced a budget crunch that restricted its ability to pull teachers out of classrooms for professional learning.
So the district's leaders decided to put 10 of its PD courses online and allow teachers to pursue the learning, and possibly earn microcredentials, on their own time. The problem? Teachers weren't signing up for the online classes, either because they didn't know about them or they weren't sure how they worked, says Erin English, principal of Vista Visions Academy, the district's online and blended learning group.
Vista took a step back and, with the help of Digital Promise, created an introductory course that teaches staff how to take the online classes and apply for the microcredentials. Teachers are paid for taking the PD courses, which cover topics such as growth mindset and Next Generation Science Standards, but not for earning a microcredential.
Already, the district is training about 400 teachers a year through this method. English says that during spring break, however, she held two face-to-face PD classes. "Our ideal is to replace those, but the [online courses] don't work for everyone."
English is hesitant to negotiate raises for microcredentials right now because not all teachers are familiar with the model. "We value it, but until we get it to be part of our culture, we haven't put microcredentials on our salary structure."
Michelle Snyder, one of Vista's teachers hired to create the online classes, summed up her feelings about micro-credentials. "Is it worth the effort? Absolutely. Teachers become motivated and passionate about what they are learning, they put that learning into action with their students, and the results drive further learning for both teachers and students. It's the best kind of learning. It doesn't dead-end at the conclusion of a workshop.
