Hi Zen,

Our micro-credentials are housed on the Digital Promise platform. Although the district does not recognize the credentials, per se, several districts in the state do have them tied to teachers' evaluation and compensation plans. We design each micro-credential to be the equivalent of one graduate credit. At the end of each 'quarter', teachers share their work internally to the group. Their work is showcased externally at the end of each year. 

Zen - Our four introductory microcredentials are currently available at Digital Promise.  Our second and third year microcredentials (including MCs on leadership, pedagogy, and math/science content) will be available sometime this upcoming summer.  We plan for each MC to take about 10 hours of work.  I love the idea of sharing their work!  At the end of each academic quarter, the teachers share their work to each other and present posters with their results.  I will ask them for permission to share the posters of their results on our website.

Hi Brian,

A few of the badges we developed, connect teachers to research in their discipline. While some of these are 'summer' projects (e.g., SEPA) it is difficult for teachers to actively engage in ongoing research during the school year.

Hi Cynthia,

The teacher leadership component involves three micro-credentials at this time - Designing and Supporting Teacher Learning I, II, and III. The badges were designed to help current teachers understand the theoretical and practice foundations of teacher learning and professional development as two constructs. Drawing on the works of Loucks-Horsley, et al and many others, Teacher Learning I offers teachers the opportunity to learning these foundations while examining student and teacher learning data at their department, school, or district levels. They identify a problem and then design a research-based, data-driven professional development initiative. Teacher Learning II focuses on the implementation and evaluation of that PD initiative, again with a focus on the gathering of teacher and student learning data. Teacher Learning III attends to examining the evaluation data and making adjustments to the original design. We have had some requests to design a Teacher Learning IV and perhaps V micro-credentials to designing a PD pathway toward National Boards for a small subset of teachers within the project.

Hello Rachel,

Many of the micro-credentials we develop are distillation of content from courses or workshops each of us have offered. Some are brand new to us. The teachers often request specific badges - Sustainability, Teacher Learning IV (see above). The primary difference between the courses and workshops is the intentional focus on a self-identified problem of practice and the action-research framework focus on the self-selected instructional intervention they want to try. Other than the first two badges on the mechanics of doing action research (Action Research I and Action Research II), teachers select which badges they want to pursue. This is an important component which they value. As for challenges, teachers are very busy and their work has variations of intensity. They also have very busy personal lives. The intensity of their work and/or their personal lives sometimes pushes against 'our' calendar. When it does, we have to remind ourselves that their first responsibility is to the students in their classrooms and themselves! So we have made adjustments in our 'due dates' to better accommodate their incredibly full lives.

We have developed microcredentials based on both teacher need and interest.  The design follows principles of practiced-based professional development (see M.S. Smith, 2001) and teacher classroom action research.

We have developed 28 MCs to date.  Of these, five are available at Digital Promise. Another batch will be released to the public this summer.  Our teachers get to choose most of the MCs they pursue, as Barbara said.  By the end of this year, they will have had the opportunity to complete 12 total (with one each academic quarter).  

I definitely recommend the micro-credential approach for other projects but our research suggests three key pieces to why it appears to incentivize participation.

First, everyone is able to build a personalize path into the multi-faceted domains for teaching. As experienced teachers, they know what they want to explore. At the same time, they are intrigued by what they do not know. The swath of badges we have developed have emerged from both the team's expertise and the teachers requests. Second. the importance of teacher voice in defining this path is critical. Most commercial or district PD is driven by someone else pedagogically inappropriate. Teachers are bright, professional learners. The importance of their voice cannot be underestimated. Third, the action-research based micro-credential appears essential as they develop and curate their professional practice. Remember, these are math and science teachers, whose brains attend to data. Data from their professional practice serves foundational in their learning and, in turn, the refinement and expansion of their professional practice. 

We recently presented this research at AERA. Several teachers have presented this work at NCTM and other NSTA forums, as well as in-state arenas. Some will be showcasing their work at the NSTA Forum in San Francisco this summer.

Deanna - Mike, Craig, Barbara, or Anja may be able to better answer this question with data but I've noticed changes in their classroom practice in the three years of our program.  I get to see each teacher's classroom every year and I've noticed that the depth of questioning, the cognitive demand of the tasks and lessons, the amount students who are wrestling with thinking about math and science, and the level of discourse in the classrooms have all increased since the first year.

Deanna, we haven't looked thus far at student assessment data aside from what teachers have collected in the course of their own action research, as we feel that's a bit limited in what it can tell us.  Our observations of the classrooms, as Jenny mentioned, have been showing us some significant changes in the types of tasks teachers are selecting and the pedagogical techniques they're using to solicit more student engagement. We're confident that these opportunities are moving the needle on students' opportunities to learn.

We also don't have a comparative group for the study, so it's hard to say if the action research approach is having more success than other approaches.  But we are anticipating by the end of the 5-year project, we'll have some important things to say about the growth of these teachers that would suggest this approach has merit.