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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.

The overwhelming bulk of our personal growth happens in open environments, without constraints or schedules, and often without guidance.

Scholarly research on implicit learning and anecdotal studies of self-taught experts (musicians, chefs, athletes, and more) speak to the power of unstructured study.

In truth, courses are not how we organize learning; they are how we organize assessment.

what are the alternatives?

Perhaps schools would do well to offer up learning experiences rather than formalized courses in all grades

Schools can honor learning opportunities that exist outside of traditional coursework.

Schools can look for ways to decouple reporting on student performance from arbitrary time frames.

how can we create space for students who need more time to consolidate their learning, to master a curriculum or set of skills?

Administration and faculty should be willing to acknowledge that courses offer venues for intellectual and personal growth but do not have a monopoly on it.

If our job is to teach critical thinking, design, and problem-solving–fluid intelligence–then thinking is our collective circumstance, and our curriculum becomes thought.

To learn to think, students need powerful and inspiring models that reflect the design, citizenship, creativity, interdependence, affection, and self-awareness we claim to want them to have. To teach careful, creative, and truly innovative thinking, students need creative spaces and tools, and frameworks to develop their own criteria for quality and success. They need dynamic literacy skills that they practice and build upon endlessly. Not projects that have creativity and design thinking added on, but projects that can’t function without them. And they need control of it all.

Can we simply “update” things as we go, or is it time for rethinking of our collective practice?

Asking questions—and asking good ones—is the foundation of critical thinking.

It takes powerful curiosity, critical thinking, and imagination to envision radical alternatives to how we do things in today’s world and then be inspired to execute them.

Intelligent Optimism

being optimistic about the future based on reason and evidence.

How can our youth grow up believing they can have a positive impact on the world if the news is suggesting otherwise?

Risk-taking

being a strategic risk-taker is a valuable lifelong skill of its own.

embracing uncertainty, stepping out of one’s comfort zone, and doing something that fulfills your life or company’s grand mission

embracing failure and re-defining failed attempts as temporary setbacks

Moonshot Thinking

Moonshot thinking allows for radical, daring, and disruptive ideas as opposed to incremental improvements

Cosmic Perspective

Having a cosmic perspective shifts the ambitions and priorities we set for ourselves to those that matter from a grand perspective. As a species, we become more purpose-driven.

It’s all about having a positive impact on the world

It’s not just about creating a product or generating profits, but also about solving a problem and having a positive impact on human lives.

It’s about asking the right questions, being intelligently optimistic about the future, taking a risk with a moonshot, and maintaining a cosmic perspective.

Research is revealing why, as the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system has the ability to open up or shut off access to learning and memory. When under stress or anxiety, the brain blocks access to higher processing and stops forming new connections, making it difficult or impossible to learn.

research shows that failure is essential.

Information in the brain that isn’t used is often lost, as neural pathways weaken over time.

Researchers have found that novelty causes the dopamine system in the brain to become activated, sending the chemical throughout the brain.

Neuroscience research suggests that the best way to learn something new isn’t to focus on mistakes, but instead to concentrate on how to do a task correctly. Focusing on the error only reinforces the existing incorrect neural pathway, and will increase the chance that the mistake will be made again. A new pathway has to be built, which means abandoning the old one and letting go of that mistake.

cater to the emotional and social needs of students and improves their ability to learn, is more important than styles

Students may have preferences for how they learn, but when put to the test, students were found to have equivalent levels of learning regardless of how information is presented.

students who don’t get intellectual stimulation over the summer are much more likely to forget important skills in reading and math when they return to class.

Peer collaboration offers students access to a diverse array of experiences and requires the use of nearly all the body’s senses, which in turn creates greater activation throughout the brain and enhances long-term memory. Group work, especially when it capitalizes on the strengths of its members, may be more beneficial than many realize.

Aside from being able to see and hear patterns, the human mind has a number of innate abilities (the ability to learn a language, for instance) that when capitalized on in the right way, can help make learning any concept, even one that is abstract, much easier. Combining these innate abilities with structured practice, repetition, and training can help make new ideas and concepts “stick” and make more sense.

Learning can change brain structure.