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Kettle Moraine, a small suburban Wisconsin district about 30 miles west of Milwaukee, has taken the lead on micro-credentials.

In Kettle Moraine teachers can earn $200, $400 or $600 toward their base pay, depending on the type of micro-credential. The district allows teachers to take courses through outside nonprofits like Digital Promise, district-created micro-credentials or individually proposed credentials. The micro-credential must be pre-approved in order to count toward compensation, so that district leadership can keep an eye on costs.

San Lorenzo School District

Tennessee is currently piloting micro-credentials as a pathway toward relicensure with 60 teachers.

Seminole County Public Schools is also looking at how micro-credentials could shake up existing models of professional development

Leaders in this movement don’t want micro-credentials to be confused with digital badges, essentially a gold star without a lot behind it, or a rubber stamp. Instead, they hope the ecosystem will evolve so that states and districts will be able to identify high-quality courses from the rest and the micro-credential itself will be a form of currency for teachers to demonstrate their knowledge and skills.

“Sometimes the best things going on are happening in your own building, and you might miss them because you’re doing your own thing,”

teachers meet regularly outside of class time to examine their students’ coursework as a team.

“The reason we look at student work is to help teachers become better teachers,”

“are better able to guide and facilitate a deeper level of student learning.”

community of learners who use planned, peer-to-peer feedback to help raise student outcomes throughout the school.

Each three-hour teacher lab focuses on a specific instructional topic that teachers choose to explore together, such as student engagement strategies.

To encourage more teacher collaboration in your school, you’ll want to consider: Time: Where will you find time within the regular school day for teachers to step outside their own classrooms and learn together? Structure: How might a protocol or specific observation prompt help to focus the learning experience? Who will play a lead role in facilitating the teacher experience and encouraging reflection? How will you capture takeaways? The National School Reform Faculty publishes a number of protocols for professional learning, such as this one for looking at student work. Follow-up: How are teachers applying what they learn together? How do students benefit as a result of teacher collaboration?

And for most, the experience of school reflects limited conceptions of the human mind, the human being and human potential.

it reinforces compliance and outdated hierarchical power structures.

To make these changes, we need pioneering teachers and educators to come together as change leaders — to form collaborative teams — and to execute strategically-focused projects. And to lay the foundations upon which these strategic projects can have massive impact, we need to build a global community of education professionals who are fully committed to self-empowering educators — for self-empowering young people.

Soft skills matter:

Jobs with high mobility on the rise

Low supply of talent for top jobs:

Future-proofing skills is critical:

Comprehensive sets of skills that cover multiple disciplines are seemingly in higher demand. Many of the roles on this list cover multiple disciplines and are applicable to multiple industries.

Certain specialist roles are on the decline

We also took a look at the skills that were growing the fastest across these professions, and the same trend emerged: soft skills are represented across the board, as well as basic computer literacy.

We surveyed more than 1,200 hiring managers to find out what they’re looking for in a candidate when it comes to soft skills: Adaptability Culture Fit Collaboration Leadership Growth Potential Prioritization

It’s always a good reminder that soft skills will always be important, no matter the profession. The ability to collaborate, be a leader, and learn from colleagues will stand out in interviews, and even more once starting a job.

But how much evidence do you have that your colleagues also see themselves as learners, be they teachers, principals or superintendents? How open and transparent are they about their learning? About what and how they are learning? And what and how do they learn from their mistakes? Being vulnerable, transparent and open are now prerequisites for modern leaders who are true learners

And finally, what about you? What have you learned about your learning? How self-aware are you about how you learn? How do you learn best, and what are the conditions that make that possible for you?