Certifiable?

The final test consists of six essay questions, a half hour for each. That’s three hours of intense concentration at the keyboard. I’m going to have to get in shape to tackle this.

Fortunately, the NBPTS website provides “exercises” to help candidates prepare for the assessment center. Copied below is the text from an NBPTS guide (in italics), followed by my comments. Next week, I will turn to the “retired prompts.” For now, let me get tired the first time.

Exercise 1: Literary Analysis
Teachers will analyze the connection between literary devices and meaning. They will be
asked to read a poem, discuss theme and effect, and use details from the poem to show
how identified literary devices affect the text.

Literary interpretation? I do this to kids all the time. But seriously, “How does it make you feel?” are two questions that I consider the one truly original contribution I’ve made to the teaching profession (“But that’s only one question, Mr R!” someone yells at this point.)

To which I reply, “No… it’s two.” First: How does it make you FEEL? Second: HOW does it make you feel? In other words, literary interpretation is based first on a reader’s genuine response to the text; from that, one can attempt to describe how the author manipulated text to inspire the emotional response.

Exercise 2: Universal Themes
Teachers will demonstrate the ability to analyze and understand text. They will be asked
to read a prose selection, determine the theme, and relate it to the human condition. They
will also select a nonprint text and connect it to both the passage and the theme.

I can do this in my students' sleep. Just today I spent two long periods with tenth graders discussing themes in Frankenstein. In a passage from Chapter 7 that resonates eerily after the Tech massacre, Victor Frankenstein expresses abhorrence over “the being [he] had cast among mankind and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror…”. What void must the shooter’s family feel now, I wonder? I don't think this is the sort of nonprint text I should use on the test.

Exercise 3: Teaching Reading
Teachers will show their knowledge of the reading process and ability to analyze student
reading. They will be asked to read a passage, a student prompt, and a student response,
and to determine the reasons for misconceptions in the reading. Teachers will also
provide strategies to correct the misconceptions.

Smells like grading a paper. I wonder if I can bring one from the stack on my desk, and kill two birds with one stone.

Exercise 4: Language Study
Teachers will demonstrate an understanding of language study and ability to determine
patterns in a student's language development. They will be asked to read a second
language learner's oral and written response to a prompt, analyze patterns, and provide
strategies to further develop that student's language.

This one is obviously geared to teaching ELLs (English Language Learners), a population I haven’t worked with formally since they were called ESL (English as a Second Language). The acronyms change, but I still remember fondly how a unit on writing business letters with ninth graders turned into a year-long project during which we obtained over fifty flags to hang in the school library.

Exercise 5: Analysis of Writing
Teachers will demonstrate an understanding of audience and purpose in writing and an
ability to analyze techniques authors employ to make a passage effective. They will be
asked to read a non-fiction passage, discuss audience and purpose, and analyze
techniques that make the piece effective for the audience and purpose.

Funny, I was just talking to a group of teachers last night at FCPS’s 16th Annual Teacher Researcher Conference about this very topic. I was trying to drum up business for the writing-project sponsored course I hope to teach this summer for George Mason. The class will help teacher-researchers and others write for publication to an audience and in a form of their choice. A young teacher-researcher might want to present her findings to colleagues on her grade level team in the form of a workshop; a more accomplished teacher may decide to craft an article for the English Journal to promote best practices across the profession.

Exercise 6: Teaching Writing
Teachers will show an understanding of the writing process. They will be asked to read a
student response, identify and discuss weaknesses, and provide strategies for correction.

And I thought this was going to make me break a sweat.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I promised to write about the released test questions this week, but like for everyone around here, banal concerns have been washed away in the swirling wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

We all made it through our week somehow, alternating between voyeuristic horror and self-preserving denial according to our natures and how psychically linked we were to Blacksburg. TJ, the high tech high where I teach, was awash in maroon and orange and the awareness that so many of our own were close to the epicenter.

The same sense of family that humanized New Yorkers after 9-11 has drawn strangers together in the aftermath of this calendar-marking day. While sharing the experience communally, each individual is struck by different aspects of it. I can’t stop thinking about the man who survived the Holocaust to die at the hands of a deranged college student.

For us educators, every school shooting is another cautionary tale. Remember that kid who used to write weird journals, one thinks. Or, what about the kid in fourth period now... I felt a chill the morning I picked up the newspaper to see the face of the shooter, followed by a jolt of self-recrimination as the dozens upon dozens of faces of anonymous Asian boys I pass in hallways every day sprang unbidden to my mind.

Another unsettling thought: “Because Cho did well in school, his mother did not seem very determined to get treatment for him,” a great-aunt of the long isolated boy recalls, quoted in Washington Post report this Saturday. The front page piece catalogs “warning signs” next to a middle school yearbook photo of a kid who looks like a million other gangly eighth graders.

Was it only his mother’s responsibility to get that treatment? “Because he did well in school.” Well enough on every test he took to move through his years of elementary and secondary education without calling much attention to himself. Well enough to get into a top engineering school. Well enough to advance, all along the way, because his problems were emotional and not academic.

In what may be the ultimate wake up call for a society obsessed with testing kids for mastery of basic skills, at some undetermined point a deviant, desperate child was left behind. And no one cared until it came to this. Somehow, it feels like we failed the most high-stakes test of all.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 6:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I have nearly scaled the mountain. Last spring, from a distance, it looked imposing and majestic. After a more arduous approach to the base than anticipated, and then a harrowing series of ascents, only the exposed final pitch remains. (Note to the casual visitor: This will read a lot better if you check out my very first post, and if you’ve read Into Thin Air by John Krakauer). After two weeks in the tent, subsisting on power bars and boiled snow, I venture from my cocoon. Empty oxygen containers and the occasional frozen corpse litter the landscape…

Okay, enough Walter Mitty (although it has gotten me this far). To complete the National Board process, now that my four-entry portfolio has been submitted, I must take a six question day-long test at a computer testing center sometime before June. What will the test cover?

The NBPTS website offers a 36-slide online tutorial, complete with a number line along the bottom to tell you where you are in the lesson. Let me save you a trip.

• Slide 3 shows a screen that tells me how to move a mouse and scroll.

• Slide 4 makes me swear on a stack of bibles that I won’t tell what was on the test.

• Slide 6 shows the 3-pane screen: directions, prompt, typing box.

• Slide 11 tells me what keys I can use when I type (I think they just forgot qwerty…).

• Slide 13 tells me that little messages will pop up as I type.

• Slide 16 says the u-turn button at lower left is to review my work.

• Slide 18 talks about the timer that counts down from 30 minutes with every question.

• Slides 19-21 talk about a calculator only math folks will use.

Now that I’ve learned to use the testing tools, the tutorial gets into the nitty-gritty. I hope.

• Slide 24 tells me I can have a 15 minute break after 3 questions. Note to self: pee first.

• Slides 25-27 are directions about directions.

• Slide 29 reveals, if I click a little box to magnify… a prompt! “Describe a contextualized learning activity…”. A lesson?

• Slide 32 depicts the screen with a little red stop sign that I’ll see at the end of the test.

• Slide 34 asks me to complete a “Candidate Exit Evaluation.” Nothing in his test became him like the leaving it.

• Slide 36 thanks me for completing the tutorial. And I thank you for completing this post.

As a reward, I will wait until next week to review the assessment exercises and “retired prompts” down-loaded from the web site. Until then, stay warm. I’m off to count my carabineers.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or, Spring Break's Sprung.

Nearly a month ago, I wrote about putting one foot in front of the other as I trudged through Entry One ("Day by Day", March 10). Here is another week-in-the-life now that I’m done with the portfolio, to show how much lighter my step has become. While there’s not much about National Board per se, Tuesday’s overnight trip was a memorable stage in the canoe project I wrote about for Entry Four.

Sunday
Ran 10 miles along Rock Creek Parkway with 18,000 like-minded souls during the 35th annual Cherry Blossom Classic (and walked another six to and from various metro stops).

Monday
Took two-year old Will to historical Oxon Hill Farm on a glorious morning and fed an entire bag of carrots to a couple tired old horses whose knees looked as sore as mine.

Tuesday
Cooked cobbler in Dutch ovens on a flaming canoe at George Washington’s Mount Vernon with a full moon overhead as a gaggle of tenth graders pack Potomac clay on the downwind wall to control the rate of the burn.

Wednesday
Sneaked into a ghost school to knock off end of quarter grading I’d put off while finishing Entry One. Rewarded myself with a trip to the fishing store in Arlington to buy a sinking line for my fly rod.

Thursday
Went shad fishing on the Potomac River at Fletcher’s Cove, a storied hot spot for the spring run of this migratory fish, only to find myself in a circle of hell Dante forgot to write about: a guy twenty feet down the bank from me caught a fish every fourth cast while I got skunked.

Friday
Start in on punchlist items including hanging a shed door and cleaning up the long-neglected yard. Cap off the industrious morning on the sun-washed back deck with an after-lunch nap over the New Yorker.

Saturday
Woke up the morning before Easter to a surreal snow-scape, crocuses covered with a delicate dusting of surprise April powder. Painting trim in the house carries the theme inside and completes the “Honey-Do” list.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My name is Emmet and I’m an eduholic.

I hit rock bottom last night between the hours of 1:30 and 2:45 am when I found myself sitting up in bed scribbling about education policy in a little black notebook by penlight next to my soundly sleeping son.

I thought that once the portfolio was signed, sealed and delivered that these middle of the night sessions would be over, but I can see now that I was deceiving myself. If it’s not National Board that’s got me spinning, it’s that kid from second period who didn’t submit his research paper, or ideas for an upcoming lesson. Or rehearsing the first few lines of a blog post. Can you hear a cast iron skillet clanging violently on my keyboard? That's my brain on education.

The particular reason I fell off the wagon last night was a productive midweek meeting with Don Gallehr, the director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project and a GMU professor, and Gail Ritchie, an FCPS guru on teacher development. We were brainstorming ways to promote and structure a course I’ll be teaching this summer that will help teacher-researchers write about and publish their findings.

Our excitement is at the new direction such a course might provide for an established form of professional development, little known outside the teaching world. “Voices from the Classroom,” as I see it, might provide a vehicle for the hard-won knowledge of frontline teachers to come to the attention of the public. Who knows, maybe one day research that’s done by real teachers in the classroom will compete with the “education research” done by wonks in cubicles that seems to currently inform policy making.

Our excitement at these new frontiers occurs in the shadow cast by the recent passing of one of the “founding mothers,” as Gail calls them, of teacher-research, Marian Mohr. Her recent death sent strong waves through both the writing project and T/R communities. Don wrote a touching remembrance. Marion MacLean, Marian’s collaborator on several books that more or less started teacher-research nearly two decades ago, is a current colleague of mine at TJ and has had a heavy heart in the lunch room lately.

More on this to come as the course and the ideas develop. For now, it’s time to do some serious end of quarter grading before spring break is sprung. Don’t want to have sleepless nights next week thinking about those never-diminished stacks.

Who am I trying to kid? Even if I get through the grading, I’ll probably be up a night or two, thinking about kids and learning. At least I’ve accomplished the first step: admitting I have a problem.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)