Partners

California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE)

The CCEE’s Leading Forward initiative challenges CA schools and LEAs to reimagine how education can serve all students. Mira Education collaborated with teachers, administrators, and other educators to develop 17 on-demand modules in five learning pathways. These pathways aligned with focus areas for the initiative, exploring transformative practices at individual, team, school, and systems levels—resulting in a model for educators to better support equity, systems change, and sustainable growth in their schools and districts.

Ed Farm

Mira Education currently supports Ed Farm in its work to design a competency-based educator learning system aligned to the International Standards for Technology in Education (ISTE), advancing Ed Farm’s mission to cultivate change through innovation, technology integration, and active learning. Related micro-credentials were developed and piloted in the 2022-23 school year. Mira Education’s ongoing partnership will build on the accessibility and visibility of these micro-credentials throughout the regions Ed Farm serves.

Richland School District One

Mira Education currently supports Richland School District One’s development of a collectively-led, district-designed personalized professional learning system. Aligned to explicit district goals and serving the specific needs of educators, the micro-credential pilot shows promise for a sustainable model. The pilot has been designed with a deep sense of ownership leading to a deliberate approach for building capacity. Lessons learned and the successes of Richland One will inform work of other districts regarding the impact of personalized professional learning on educators and students.

South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE)

The SCDE has partnered with Mira Education to design, implement, and scale its model for collective leadership for participating schools. Over the last seven years, Mira Education has provided ongoing support to the statewide Collective Leadership Initiative (CLI), including implementation of learning modules, development of collective leadership practices, and analysis of data collected to inform strategy design. As a direct result, more than 90% of educators in CLI schools report confidence in seeing themselves as leaders capable of narrowing achievement gaps, building collective efficacy, and maximizing resources at their schools.

University of South Carolina College of Education

Mira Education’s ongoing partnership with the College of Education at the University of South Carolina (UofSC) directly supports CarolinaCrED in delivering a range of customized supports in personalized professional learning design and implementation for SC learners and leaders; the Carolina Collaborative for Alternative Preparation (CarolinaCAP) in its implementation of a high-quality alternative pathway into teaching; stories of educator experience from CarolinaTIP, a three-year program of support for new teachers; and the Teacher Education Advancement Consortium through Higher Education Research (SC-TEACHER) focused on comprehensive research of teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention efforts in SC.

The innovative collaboration of this work has helped UofSC recruit more than 300 teaching applicants in CarolinaCAP’s pipeline who are eager to “chart a personalized pathway to learn and demonstrate competency in content and pedagogy” through the use of more than 200 micro-credentials (produced by UofSC with Mira Education’s support), as well as four successful campaigns to tell the personal stories of SC teachers to inform others about their unique experiences from preparation to practice.

This partnership is a model for other colleges and universities who are interested in pursuing expansion of innovative practices to address the shifting demands of teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention, as well as strengthening the role and efficacy of alternative pathways to teaching in various states.

University of Maryland (UMD)

Mira Education is a partner in the School Improvement Leadership Academy housed at the University of Maryland’s Center for Education Improvement and Innovation (CEII). Working in collaboration with CEII and Learning Forward, Mira Education supports participating principals and assistant principals in three states to demonstrate growing competencies to lead improvement, equity, and instruction in their schools. This effort will ultimately accelerate personalized pathways to leadership development and retention, as well as boosting impact of school improvement efforts.

Voorhees University

Mira Education currently serves the Voorhees Center of Excellence for Educator Preparation & Innovation as a design and implementation partner to deliver competency-based, personalized preparation pathways. This unique partnership between Mira Education, Voorhees, and UofSC’s CarolinaCAP supports the Center’s mission to create equitable learning outcomes for students in underserved, high-need areas and subjects and to address teacher shortages through the preparation of a diverse and effective teacher workforce.

Wake Co. Public School System

Mira Education facilitated Wake County’s efforts to design a micro-credential pilot that reached 75% of the targeted instructional assistants and other educators. Best practices learned in micro-credential development have now informed the work of a collaborative of other districts supported through grants from the NC Department of Public Instruction. As a result, the district is now poised to begin similar professional learning initiatives to impact teacher retention and develop leadership among educators.