As I drove to work one morning last week, dark clouds began to form. I was discouraged with the feedback I’d been getting about my accomplishment write-ups. Responses to my Entry Four attempts from various quarters, this blog included, have essentially been a no-nonsense chorus of so what’s.

Should I pull the plug on this NBPTS thing, I half wondered? Am I just not the kind of teacher that registers on their scale? Forgotten comments on earlier posts came back to me, those voices of teachers who hadn’t made it. I read those words of warning with a cavalier attitude then—this won’t be me, I thought. Now I wasn’t sure.

Thank goodness I ran into Barb, an already Board-certified colleague whose own no-nonsense advice dispelled the clouds. First, she said, stop worrying so much about “student achievement,” the drumbeat of Entry Four. The NBPTS process, she postulates, is largely geared to a population of kids we don’t have—low- and mid-level achievers whose test scores need to be raised. Not that Barb and I don’t care about making kids better. We’re teachers. Of course we do. But at our school, achievement per se is not an issue. Scores on virtually any scale are incredibly high. Our challenge is how to engage the gifted learner.

To me, for example, making the canoe in this context is a dynamite experience. These bookish kids need to get out there and swing an axe— I know this project is something that they’ll always remember. While the connections this project fosters with parents, community and my colleagues are strong, I can see that I’ll have to struggle to link it to student achievement. Unfortunately, by the NBPTS measure, the character building and hands-on experience that matter to me in this project don’t rate. That’s disheartening.

Being a freelance writer is another accomplishment that’s important to me and central to who I am as a teacher. But, in the words of a recent commenter on the blog (and before that, Miles Davis): So what? Showing the link between my writing and student achievement will be difficult at best, even though I know it’s there.

Accept the fact that you may not fully convince the readers, said Barb, and move on. Or, consider other things you do that are less glamorous but easier to document, like sponsoring a tutoring program at a local elementary school. Get your points on the other entries, Barb concluded, and just assume that for your accomplishments, you won’t get the highest score.

Remember, she adds, that your goal is to get the points. In order to pass. To get the money. This may sound Machiavellian, but, as Alfie Kohn acknowledges even if most educators do not, any point system begs to be gamed. And, as I stated frankly in my first post, while I relish the professional challenge, if this process wasn’t worth $50,000 to me, I wouldn’t be doing it.

(By the way: Wednesday wasn’t as bad. I went to the NBPTS support class and made headway in revising my entries, following the explicit advice of “Marybeth NBCT” commenting on “Phew”: keep the bible open next to you on the desk. That’s a little depressing, too, but it works.)

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 8:10 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Last week there was a lot going on (or was it just another week?). Homecoming fever swirled in the halls, we had our first writing groups in the graduate class that I teach at night, and there was an afternoon of work on the canoe at Mount Vernon. Below are some high points.

Homecoming

A schedule of events so complex that the student government writes a helpful 2-page guide (single-spaced) for freshman, including the themes. Freshman: Under the bed. Sophomore: Under the big top. Junior: Underwear, capes and masks. Seniors: Undercover. Faculty: Under age.

A new tradition born from a fire code-fiasco. Last year, the venerable “spirit halls” were shut down by the fire marshall so kids adapted with mobile parades called “The Experience.”

Only at TJ File: timed competitive banner-making.

Best faculty costume: The new principal, 34, known for riding a scooter through the halls, comes to school on Thursday dressed like a big baby. Diaper and all.

Only at TJ File 2: during a bleacher-rattling pep rally, a girl stands behind me intently reading her notes for chemistry.

Writing Groups

The magic happened. Again. I had nervously shuffled note cards back and forth among piles the week before, hoping to create chemistry between colleagues I’m just starting to get to know, or at least balance groups with members from a variety of grade levels and schools. I plan to rotate from group to group each week. Here’s what my colleagues shared in the group I joined this time.

Gail voiced frustrations with special ed teacher bureaucracy and politics:
“[It seems at times] a bottomless well-- dark, dank, and never ending, with prickly protrusions poking from the walls as I fall...”.

Carlette wrote from the point of view of a fictional student who thinks having her paper read in English class is like running down the school hall naked:
She could just hear people saying, “Man, look at that bird chest!”
“I think she needs implants,” yells another.
“Do you think she eats?” bellows someone else.
That’s what Farla envisioned. Except when sharing her writing, she would hear people say “diction” instead of “bird chest,” “assistance” instead of “implants,” and “eats” would be “ever pays attention in English class?”...

Lucy told about getting stuck in traffic, with her husband and four-year old daughter, behind teenagers who made out at every red light:
Stopped once more behind the turtle doves at a light where timing is crucial, my husband turned all the lights on from the Hummer, and illuminated the interior of the suck-face car, highlighting to the world the glory of hormonal teens. I started snickering... while he quietly gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead...

Gordon’s dry British wit shone through in a narrative about an evening’s adventure that began with a candid admission, and grabbed me with a poignant detail a few side-splitting pages later:
I had been drinking. That much is true...
In the garage I press up against the five year old’s tricycle.

The Canoe

We used stone tools! A beautifully hand-crafted adze, specifically, with a green stone (rhyolite) blade attached with rawhide to an osage haft and handle (actually a single piece of wood with a branch coming off it). It was lighter than the iron ship-builder’s adze we also used, and perfectly balanced.

The afternoon’s work began with the task of raising the log off the ground to prevent rot, which we did with a combination of levers. Turning a 2x4 on edge, ASF director Joe Youcha taught the kids an impromptu lesson about the tensile strength of wood and the advantages of going with (or against) the grain.

After lifting the multi-ton tree trunk onto blocks, we rotated it about 45 degrees to expose a new side for debarking and give us a better angle to smooth the lopped off surface that had been at the top for future marking (hence the adzes).

Also, a docent board created by our kids in class the week before was popular with tourists and so informative that the farm supervisor requested that we leave it on site for in costume interpreters to study so they can better field questions about the canoe in progress.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 12:31 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

I’m winging it on the Latin, but what I mean to say is “Reader, beware.” Slow prose ahead.

I brought a couple drafts of Entry Four accomplishments to class and got some feedback from my table mates. Not enough “I verb,” they said, and ditch the flowery language. Jill, who included bolded quotes from the standards in her draft, said this helps because they take exactly twenty minutes to assess it (she heard this from a friend of hers who thought about reading for NBPTS as a summer job but decided against it when she heard about the stop watch).

Turns out, ten pages double-spaced isn’t near as much room as I thought to record the accomplishments of a career, especially if one values voice and metaphor in writing, as I do. Like my students when we switch from the kind of writing I train them to do in workshop to “test writing,” (I’m borrowing that clinical word from a colleague in the teaching of writing class I’m leading now), I’m in the uncomfortable position of trying to write straight. Very straight. And I’m not even sure I’m doing that very well, at least by the standards of NBPTS readers.

I’ll let you be the judge of that, however. Below are two drafts: one on the canoe project which is too breezy, and the other on my freelance writing career which, while too long now, is an attempt at more NBPTS-appropriate “resume-ese.” In fairness, the canoe project is still very much unfolding, so I probably won’t be able to write accurately about aspects of it like “How has this influenced student achievement?” until more of the year has unfolded.

A couple notes on format. In the canoe piece, I used separate sections to accentuate the impact within three required categories (connects to community, lifelong learner, and professional leadership). In the second piece, there are parenthetical ideas about what evidence to include (we are allowed 16 pages of documentation to support 10 pages of accomplishments).

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 7:57 AM | Permalink | 7 Comments | Recommend

Thank goodness it’s raining, so at least the sun isn’t calling me out to play in the yard with the kids. I’m at the keyboard and psyching myself up to begin Entry Four. Okay, I’m back in college. It’s a 10-page paper. That’s nothing. Write fast and throw in lots of catch-phrases from the bible ( “Keep those entry standards by your keyboard for constant reference,” reminds Marybeth, from California, in a helpful comment on my last post.) I'll use the template below when writing about my accomplishments.

Entry Four consists of:
· Description and analysis, 10 pp typed, double-spaced
· Documentation 16 pp
· Reflection 2 pp

Covers three categories:
· as a partner with students’ families and their community (current year)
standards buzzwords to use:

(Note to candidates: you fill in the blanks here, as your standards may be different than mine based on your certification area. For your reference, I have culled my top ten lists of the three relevant standards for Early Adolescence/ English Language Arts and append them at the end of this post. Note that they are inverse order a la Letterman.)

· as a learner (from past 5 years)
standards buzzwords to use:

· as a leader and/or collaborator (from past 5 years)
standards buzzwords to use:

Reflective Summary:
· Outside the classroom, what was most effective in impacting student learning? Why?
· Considering patterns, how will I further student learning in the future?

Final thought, or, why this post is so short: Once a student curious about the talmud (close enough to cabbalah for our purposes) went up to a famous scholar and said, “Rabbi Hillel, tell me the secret of life while I’m standing on one foot.” The rabbi stroked his beard for a moment, and then replied: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.”

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 9:42 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

No one else has done Entry Four either. At least, none of the people that I talked to on Wednesday night at the first meeting of the NBPTS candidates support course had finished documenting their “Contributions to Student Learning.”

Several dozen of us gathered in the cafeteria at Edison high school after a hump day to “begin” in earnest the process of board certification that will culminate with the submission of a four-entry portfolio in May and a one-day battery of online essays at a testing center in June. Among those dozens were more than a handful who, like me, had taken the county’s introductory course last spring, and who probably had the same high hopes I did then that Entry Four would be complete and in the box by this time.

The main difference between those of us who had taken the intro course and those who hadn’t seemed to be that on the friendly self-assessment worksheet, “How Am I Doing?”, the newbies checked mainly “no’s”, while we seasoned veterans had most of our checks in the “yes” and “sort of” columns:

“I have read the entire standards booklet.” Umm, well, no. I’ve read a few standards though. Can I get away with a “sort of” on that, even if “entire” is in bold?

“I know which standards Entry 4 is assessing.” Yes, definitely. I wrote five blog posts on that one. I just didn’t, technically, do it. Yet. (NBPTS candidates: for a recap of these posts, see "Reuse, Recycle, Reflect" from September 2).

“I know the difference between a score of 2 and 3.” Sort of. It’s in my notes, I’m sure. I mean, I vaguely remember discussing that, around the time of the Winter Olympics. I was stuck on the couch back then and wrote something about twizzles.

Okay, okay. So maybe I’m not as prepared to begin this process as I should be. Nevertheless, I stick by the sigh of relief in my title. At least now, I have structure. A plan. A room full of people who are as anxious as I am.

The way this support seminar will work, from what I can tell, is that we show up every couple weeks for a few hours to meet with other candidates and a few already board-certified “readers” to workshop our entries. And we bring food. Perfect.

Other than that, there’s only a no-nonsense assignment schedule (“October 11: Bring 4 complete accomplishment write-ups... November 8: Bring a video clip of you teaching... March 14: FINISH YOUR PORTFOLIO!”) and a well-designed blackboard site complete with groups based on our certification areas and pictures of our instructors with their contact information, which is a snappy touch that gave me just a tad of blackboard envy.

Oh, and there’s Gail. Every one who goes through this process should have a Gail Ritchie, Fairfax County’s own mother hen when it comes to all things NBPTS. She’s smoothed the road for me several times already-- most recently, last Tuesday, when she helped me enroll late in this class even though I hadn’t, ahem, quite kept track of the details.

As well as concierge, Gail is a liaison with both the state and NBPTS, snipping red tape where she can and drawing clear lines for candidates about ethics and ethos. She emphasized the idea, from the syllabus, that Board Certification is a process and not just an end in itself: “There is no formula for a successful entry, and no one style of teaching or writing that can guarantee a passing score.” No right answers. Phew. For some reason, that makes me feel better.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 8:56 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend