Stories from Schools is pleased to have the following post from Michaela Miller, a Washington NBCT, who is currently the Director of State Policy and Outreach for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Formerly, Michaela worked at the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction directing the Teacher and Principal Evaluation Project, National Board, and the Beginning Teacher Support Program. Prior to that Michaela taught English in the North Thurston School District. 

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An NBCT’s Reflections,
Transitions and Opportunities

Twelve
years ago this week, two major events clouded my thoughts. The first: “How am I
going to attempt to explain the horrific events of 9/11 to my students?” The
second thought was ”When is the almighty "Blue Box" coming from the National
Board?” The first was incredibly challenging as my social studies partner and I
struggled not only to explain the events to our new 9^th graders, but
to understand the tragedy ourselves. Somewhat selfishly, however, I couldn't stop thinking about the second question as I anxiously awaited directions to what
would prove to be a turning point in my teaching career.

At
that time, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards was undergoing
a revision in 2001 and I was somewhat naively entering the process during the transition
from the first version of the assessment to the second. I spent the previous four
months with only three secrets to the new process: The Adolescent Young Adult
English Language Arts (AYA ELA Standards), the Five Core Propositions
and the Architecture of Accomplished Teaching. In the end, this solitary
confinement with these three touchstones created a critical foundation to my
year as a National Board candidate. The standards and the architecture are the
backbone of the National Board process and, with my students leading the way,
these touchstones came alive in my practice.

Today,
the National Board stands ready for yet another transition– and I can only
imagine that candidates are wondering what it will mean for them. Certainly,
revising the assessment process again will mean changes not only for them, but
also for support providers and National Board champions to understand and adapt
to. The assessment will evolve over the next three years—moving to 4 components, lowering the cost to around $1,900 and continuing to
streamline the electronic submission process.

Despite these changes, the foundation of National
Board Certification will remain constant. National Board Standards will always
be created for teachers, by teachers, the Architecture of Accomplished Teaching,
the Five Core Propositions will not change. These are the critical elements at
the heart of the assessment that all ultimately ensures that National Board
Certified Teachers positively impact our students and are always striving to be
more reflective practitioners.

Continue reading →

by Maren Johnson

A few years ago I decided to pursue National Board Certification.  Then I looked at the process.  No way!  I would never have the time to do that!  My children were very young, I had a full time job, numerous other responsibilities.

I sat on the idea for a year, but then found I was still interested.  However, doing it all in one year was just too much.  So what did I do?  I decided to spread the work over two years by doing Take One the first year, and the rest of the process the next.  Yes, that did break it up a little bit, but I always wished I could have broken it up even more–it was quite an uneven split between one entry one year and three entries plus the assessment center the second year!

My story is not unique–the time burden and financial demands the National Board process places on individuals in a single year can be an obstacle to pursuing National Board Certification.  These obstacles bear no relationship to whether or not a teacher's practice actually meets the National Board standards. 

Now that process is changing! National Board Candidates will now have the option to complete the process over some years, and pay as they go.  The certification fee, payable over time, will be approximately $1900, as compared to the current $2565.  These changes will make the process more accessible to more teachers–time, financial issues, family and other commitments, will no longer be quite the road block they once were to pursuing this rigorous process.  This increase in accessibility is welcome!

Currently, the National Board process consists of four entries and six assessment center exercises, and candidates complete all of this in one year.  NBPTS is looking to reformulate those 10 parts into a smaller number of components. Implementation of the new process will be spread over multiple years as components are developed and released. Two of the components will likely be available in 2014-2015, and the other components after that.  

Once all of the components are available, candidates will have a choice:  Want to do the whole thing in one year?  Great!  Do circumstances necessitate that you spread it out over several years?  That's fine too!

What's not changing?  The rigor and the National Board standards.  This thing is still going to be tough, and it's still going to focus on improving student learning.

There are some long and short term implications.  In the short term, rolling it out over a few years means that the only candidates certifying in that transitional time span will be retake candidates from previous cycles.  What does this mean for candidates who had been planning for a stipend, such as candidates who may have been counting on it for the last ten years before retirement?  What does this mean for candidates who had been counting on National Board Certification to fulfill state teaching certificate requirements ?

What do these changes mean for this year?  Will there be an influx of candidates this fall once teachers realize that if they do not get into the pipeline now, it will be a few years before they are able to receive certification?  Or, on the other hand, will candidates want to wait and not start until next year so they can be part of the new process?  How do Take One candidates fit in?

What about the next few years?  What will candidate support systems look like? How will cohorts be structured?  What are the implications for legislative support?  How about those National Board rituals, both big and small?  This past year, we lost "the box" and the associated "packing parties" with the move to online submission.  That turned out, for the most part, to be a welcome change.   As this new National Board Certification process moves foward, what are the shared events and key moments that will bring NBCTs together?

Related articles

National Board group goes on a Road Trip

Hope and Fear: New National Board Candidates

The following entry is a guest-post from Jeff Charbonneau, 2013 National Teacher of the Year, 2013 Washington State Teacher, NBCT, and Chemistry, Physics and Engineering Teacher from Zillah HS. 

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What will this year
hold?

For me and so many other teachers, the start of the school
year is a magical time filled with energy, new plans, ideas, and instructional
strategies.

A great many of us have spent the summer reading up on a
vast array of educational trends. 
Ranging from flipped classrooms to keeping cursive in the schools, we
have been knee deep in professional communities, conferences and followed
#edchat tweets until late into the nights.

With all these new tools hanging from our belts, I have to
ask, what will be different this year?

My hope is that this year will be the year that (among many,
many other things):

1.  We maintain an emphasis that education goals
are more important than the tools.

Don’t get me wrong, as a STEM
teacher who uses a smart phone, tablet, laptop, and a traditional pc daily (if
not all in the same hour), I strongly advocate for tech tools to help improve
instruction.  However, there are
times when paper and pencil are simply the best tools for the job. The past few
years there has been a trend to value tech integration for the sake of
technology integration.  However,
the tools are not the goal!

We, as a community of educators,
need to ensure that the tools we employ are used to improve learning.
Certainly technology can do that. 
However, I have seen far too many purchase technology and then try to
make it work; rather than determining the learning goals first, followed by
selecting the right tool (tech or non) for the job. 

I am an early adopter of technology
in both my personal and professional life, but sometimes there is nothing
better than paper and pencil.

Pick the goal before the tool!

2. We celebrate and communicate the success of
our students and staff.

 As a profession, we do an excellent job at
pointing out issues and problems within our system.  I do not deny these issues; they are
real and it is vital that we improve in several areas if we are going to meet
the needs of all of our students.

However, if we are to move forward, we must be willing to acknowledge the
successes that are all around us!

When one of my physics students incorrectly
answers a problem, I do not label them as failures, publicly ridicule, or place
blame. Instead I look for what that student did correctly, then help them to
understand the key places for improvement and work side by side in order to
help them succeed. 

As teachers, we know how to motivate our
students, let’s do the same with our profession.

Let’s make a conscious decision to showcase
the abilities and the progress that our students are making.

I fully admit that we have our problems, and
we need to continue to identify and communicate them with our parents and
community at large.  All I am
asking is that we put the same effort into identifying and sharing our success
too!

Now it’s your turn, as a teacher, what will you do to make
this year personally and professionally exceptional? 

By Tom

I’m heading back to the classroom tomorrow for the thirtieth
time. Although I’m not big on looking back, it’s hard not to notice the numbers
that end in zeros. When I started we were still using ditto machines. The
school secretary (not office manager) and the principal were the only people
with telephones. Computers? Our whole staff shared one IBM Selectric.
We also had real chalkboards, real chalk and reel-to-reel film projectors.

Although my own teaching has evolved, I’m pretty sure the
1984 Tom would recognize the older guy. I’m still strict, I’m still structured
and I still write out every lesson plan. I’m also still learning how to do this
amazingly complex job.

And speaking of learning, if I had to pick three experiences
that had the biggest impact on my career and life as a teacher, I would start
with 1993, when my wife and I went on a teaching exchange to Australia. Besides
the weather, the beaches and the kangaroos, what I remember most was the fact
that I went down there with absolutely no materials. I found out what grade I
would be teaching the day before school started. And I did fine. I learned that
teaching isn’t about what you use and what you have in your room; it’s about
the connections you make with the people in that room. It’s not about telling a
kid which page to open to, but it’s about showing that kid what happens when
she opens her mind. A teacher is the person who brings the learning, not the
guy who runs off the papers and assigns the work. I came back home and threw
most of my materials away.

The next big moment came in 1996, when my first son was
born. It was then that I realized exactly what this job is all about. It’s not
that I didn’t already understand how precious and amazing each child is, but it
wasn’t until then that I actually felt it.
Holding that little kid for the first time made me realize what an awesome
responsibility each of us have. And how important it is for a teacher to
connect with the whole family, not just the students.

The third moment came in 2000 when I went through the
process of National Board Certification. Not only was the process itself the
best professional development I’ve ever experienced, but certifying was immensely
validating: I was being told by people who knew what they were talking about
that I actually knew what I was doing. Besides all that, National Board
certification marked the point in my career when I began to reach out and lead
other teachers; a mixed blessing as it turned out, since ever since then I’ve
had to work very hard to prevent leadership activities from impinging on my
true love: teaching.

So now what? I’m thinking twenty more. Seriously. Teaching is
one of the few professions in which you get to take your retirement on the
installment plan. And I’m very good at retiring for about eight weeks at a time. But now it’s time to put the toys away, get the room ready for the kids and get
back to work.

Again.

By Kristin

The last three posts on this blog have responded to the Federal Government's warning that unless Washington uses test data as part of a teacher's evaluations, we no longer meet the waiver requirements for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA or No Child Left Behind).

In no moment of my professional or academic life has one test been used to measure my growth.  The biggest assessments I've sat in my life – the SAT, the GRE, my National Board tests – were used to measure whether or not I was ready for the next step of my career.  

Why are some groups still insisting this is the best way to measure a teacher's impact on student growth?  It is so misguided.

Continue reading →

By Tom

Mark and Maren have both written about the news that
Washington State is in a little trouble for failing to follow the Department of
Education’s guidelines for the use of state tests in teacher evaluations. Here's a small example of how using state tests to evaluate teachers
can have some negative side-effects.

Last spring I was in a meeting with the other fourth grade
teachers in my school, along with our principal and the support staff. We were
planning for this coming year. Our principal made the suggestion that we might
want to place all six students who are on an IEP (Individualized Education
Plan) into the same classroom. The reason was simple: if they were all in the
same room, we could deliver support service more efficiently; the support
teacher could come into the room and help those kids, all of whom would be
working on the same lessons, and she wouldn’t have to coordinate with three
different teachers, who may or may not be focusing on the same learning activities.

It made sense to me, and I volunteered to be the teacher
into whose rooms those six kids would be placed. I was willing to “take one for
the team,” knowing that I would have way more than my share of high-needs
students, each of whom performed poorly on their state tests, but also knowing
that those six kids would have a more relevant support experience and the whole
fourth grade would be better off.

Under Washington State’s current (albeit illegal) teacher
evaluation system, I wouldn’t be penalized for having more than my share of
high-needs students. I’m planning to use a classroom-based reading, math and
writing assessment at three different points throughout the year, and I expect
all of my students to show growth, including those six kids who are on an IEP.
I’m not worried at all about collecting this data and showing it my principal
as part of my evaluation. It makes total sense.

However, should the Department of Education get their way,
forcing Washington State to capitulate to their demands, I would be a fool to
do next year what I did this year. Next year I will be evaluated based in part on
a comparison of the number of my kids who met state standard in third grade
with the number who met standard after a year with me.

And that means that those six kids would compromise my
evaluation. It’s more likely than not that those six kids will lower the
percentage of students in my class that pass the state test. Remember, they
didn’t pass their tests last year, when they were in third grade. This year
they’ll be taking the fourth grade test, which is harder. Even if they make academic
gains, they will be taking a harder test, and more than likely they’ll have some
problems. I don’t say that because I have low expectations of these kids. I say
that because all the data that’s ever been collected shows that kids who struggle
one year tend to struggle the next year.

Under next year’s evaluation system (assuming Washington State
bows down to Washington, DC) it will behoove me and every other teacher to start
the year with the strongest class possible. Think about it: high achievers have
already shown that they learn faster than their peers; that’s how they got to
be high achievers in the first place. On the other hand, low achievers have shown that it takes them more time to learn. Sometimes it takes them more than a year to learn what their classmates learn in a year. And if they start out behind their classmates, they can make a year's worth of progress and still not be at grade level when they take their state tests. 

These are not excuses. This is not the "soft bigotry of low expectations." This is simple cause and effect. When a teacher evaluation system is based on state test scores, those who teach struggling students will suffer unfair consequences.

Which means that this is the last time I take one for the team.