This is my post critiquing National Board Certification for Teaching

This hardly seems worth writing, except that so few people write about this stuff.

Six, maybe seven years ago, I started thinking about what it would take for me to teach in public schools. I had already been teaching for a couple years, and the idea of taking time off of teaching to get a teaching degree…I couldn’t convince myself it was financially feasible, and it seemed like it would be a bore, compared to teaching.

Somewhere along the line I tossed off a doomed application to NYC’s teaching fellows program. I remember writing something, like hey, you could use a teacher with some experience, I need a teaching degree, you scratch my back I scratch your’s. Dear applicant: no. 

For a while NY had an independent pathway towards certification that seemed possible, but then they discontinued it.

I kept on reading this bit of the certification website, making sure I wasn’t misunderstanding it: “An applicant who possesses a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certificate may obtain an Initial New York State certificate in a comparable title through the National Board Pathway.” This seemed like exactly what I needed.

So, four years ago, I started the process. They were revising the NBPTS portfolios, so I could only do it one bit at a time.

The math test was my first encounter with a Pearson Testing Center. I tried to prepare for the exam by cramming some calculus that I was rusty on. The entire test day was surreal. Went into a surprisingly small office in midtown Manhattan. I was imagining that it would be like when I took the SATs, that a whole crew of stressed out teachers would be sitting for an exam simultaneously. Nah, it’s more like a self-service gas station. Put your belongings in a cubby. Sign here. Here is your computer. Here is your sheet of plastic and a dry-erase marker. Boop. Time’s up. Have a great day.

Component 2 was my first experience with the written stuff. It was then that I learned my most important NBCT lesson: how to condense text.

How little I knew about condensing text when I began NBCT! This is from my first draft of my C2 written commentary:

Awful, right! I mean, look at all that space. Here is what I ended up submitting, after getting feedback from a couple NBCT geniuses:

I passed C2. The next year was C3, the video portfolio. This was annoying because you couldn’t do any preparatory work until you had the video, and the little camera that I had set up would constantly run out of battery in the middle of the lesson.

The hardest thing about the videos was that you needed them to provide evidence for exactly what NBCT was assessing you on. I felt like it was hard to capture a video that gave them exactly what I wanted. Here is the feedback I got from NBCT after I received my passing score (3.375) on the portfolio:

OK, yes, there is irony in the quality of the feedback that NBCT gives you. Good luck parsing any of that. I just read “evidence of insight on your future instructional practices” three times to figure out if I can figure it out — not yet.

That left Component 4, which was no question the worst component. It’s sort of a mess. There are three parts, each calling for exactly the right kinds of evidence, and the three parts have very little to do with each other. It’s like three mini-portfolios glued together. I hated it, but I did it, and it’s done.

It’s done — I passed.

If a teacher tells me that they are NBCT, I think I know something about that teacher. They’re hard-working, because NBCT is a lot of work. They are likely ambitious, probably not on their way out of the profession.

All this I know because NBCT was a ton of work. I can’t imagine a teacher going through this without something pushing them — either a financial incentive or something internal.

So I know they’re hard-working and committed to teaching, but that’s pretty much all that I know. Nothing about the NBCT process gives me any confidence that it was assessing the quality of my teaching in any sense at all.

I have a couple friends who have been on the other end of things, assessing candidates. I believe them when they tell me there’s a clear difference in quality between different candidates. But having done all the work, I have trouble seeing exactly how you can tell the difference between a candidate who just didn’t understand the prompts and someone whose teaching meets the standards. Because it was really hard to figure out what the prompts were calling for — that was a lot of the work.

Maybe I’m just in a grouchy mood. Even though I love working at my school — public school is going to have to wait — I’ve been feeling a bit down lately.

It all feels sort of bad right now. Writing’s bad, I won’t even edit this piece. Bad at math. Kids hate math, though kids like class. Small apartment, we try not to flush in the AM because it might wake up the kids. Kitchen’s small, fridge is small, always catching mice.

Education can be so, so dumb so often, math education in particular. The dumb stuff is the most lucrative. Teachers seem to love this stuff, though, so what am I doing? All the people I knew teaching math six years ago are off doing other stuff.

But I got this certificate, and now I’m NBCT, and I also have a letter from NBCT saying “your voice matters,” so there’s that.

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A quick shout out to proteacher.net. The people on there are the best. If you have questions about NBCT you should absolutely hop on there and make an account. If you’re starting NBCT, you should go there and make an account. The people there were just ridiculously generous with their time and it’s a lovely corner of the internet of teachers. That’s my only useful piece of advice for NBCT.