National Board Certification

As of Friday, I am a National Board certified adolescent/young adult English language arts teacher!

That was some serious work!

Anyone else go through/considering going through this process?

 

It's pretty intense. It's a portfolio and then a series of tests... Of course, this is for me, English Language Arts for Adolescents and Young Adults.

I had to do a portfolio for my masters, but it wasn't as big as this one.

The portfolio is a basically a bunch of evidence and a bunch of writing.

There are four portfolio entries.

1. Evidence of how you move students forward in reading and writing. You have to select a couple students, identify their issues with reading and writing, and show how you teach them so they get better. You have to include pieces of their work... four from each student... well, four assignments... and a few pieces (3, I believe) from each assignment. Then you have to write it all up.

2. A 15 minute video showing you facilitating learning in a whole group discussion. Then a big writeup... and evidence from that.

3. A 15 minute video showing you facilitating learning in small group discussions. Writeup, evidence... and you have to be seen with two groups.

4. This is the most filled with evidence.... the whole thing is your evidence of you working as a leader and a collaborator... of you as a learner.... and of you as someone who works with the students' families and the community... and all of this as it relates directly to student learning.

That's the portfolio. I probably wrote a couple hundred pages to get around 50... and included so much evidence. I saved everything.

The next part is called the Assessment Center. This has six exercises. Again, this is what was on the AYA/ELA:

1. Literary analysis. 30 minutes to read a poem and write a whole lot about it, including identifying three literary devices and how they affect the poem's theme, etc.

2. Universal themes... read a piece of writing... identify the theme and how it connects to the human condition... then discuss a non-print text (film, music, artwork, etc.) that you would use to reinforce this theme... something like that.

3. Teaching reading... read something a student read, then see how the student responded... identify the problem with the student's reading and talk about a couple ways you'd help the student to fix the problems.

4. Language Study. This has to do with English language learners. You see something a student read or was asked. See how he/she responded orally... and how the student responded in writing. You have to identify issues with these responses and talk about how you'd deal with them... teaching strategies.

5. Response to writing. This is rhetorical analysis. Identifying audience, purpose, theme, etc. of a piece of writing.

6. Teaching writing... identifying problems in a student's writing talking about how to fix them... strategies, etc.

They don't get shorter or easier... I was just tired of writing.

Anyway, they're all cold reads. It's nothing one has even seen before... You have all six of those and you have 30 minutes for each... if you run out of time, it just goes to the next exercise.

This was in June. I just got results Friday. What a wait...

Anyway, it's all a LOT of work.

 

Thanks! Technically, you have three years to do it. Some do it more quickly. I took a year. There's a way to break up the process a little, a thing called "Take One." I don't know too much about it. I just know that a colleague of mine did only her Entry 3, the small group. She did well on it, too.

Right now, on the teachers.net boards, there is a big mixture of happy and miserable people. Some are upset that they didn't pass after their third attempts to do so.... others their second... some are happy they finally passed after two failures, etc. Pretty wild to read. This was my first time trying.