Licensure and Relicensure

Facilitators

: Mary-Dean Barringer, CCSSO, and Christine Yarzabek, Digital Promise
Essential Question: How can MCs support the advancement of the teacher licensure process?

Licensure and Relicensure

This session focused on supporting the licensure or relicensure process with micro-credentials. To simplify the conversation and target their efforts, participants immediately decided to focus on re-licensure, rather than initial licensure.

Challenge statement: Design models to integrate micro-credentials as pathways to advance a performance-based renewal of teacher licensure.

To inform their discussion, participants developed guiding questions which were sorted into five categories: current system, design, quality and rigor, policy, and communication. They included: What is currently in place to support re-licensure? How do we ensure rigor and fidelity in assessments? What state and local policies and necessary? What is our overall goal?

To address this challenge, participants identified several activities:

• Design a one-pager for states that provides a list of questions leaders should answer to prepare to incorporate micro-credentials into re-licensure programs. This document covers topics such as timeline, communications plan, micro-credential identification, and distribution of responsibilities.
• Review Education Commission of the States’ documentation and survey NASDTEC members on existing policies to better understand existing policies and systems.
• Develop and administer a survey of educators to assess changes in behavior over time as a result of micro-credentials.
• Organize a convening of representatives from key organizations (including, but not limited to, state and national boards of education, legislators, SEAs, union leaders and instructional leaders, micro-credential experts, and educators) to address the development of a common language and why/to whom it is important.
• Develop and administer a survey of the teaching workforce, district leaders, and policymakers to inform necessary changes.
• Conduct focus groups to dive deeper into the patterns that emerge from the survey.

Relicensure Symposium Presentation

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These guiding activities ultimately led the group to propose the creation of a larger toolkit to make the process clear for stakeholders and clearly define why incorporating micro-credentials into relicensure is both necessary and important.

For next steps, group members hope to clarify roles, survey the field to examine what is out there and what is the interest for micro-credentials, complete a meta-analysis of unanswered questions, and form a study group to grow wisdom and push this effort forward.