The Power of Accomplished Teaching

Congratulations to our own Susan Carter, NBCT and member of ecgen.org for publishing Elegant and Accomplished Teaching: A Guide to National Board Certification for the Early Childhood Generalist. This book will walk you right through your portfolio work and then your prep for the Assessment Center. While other books speak in general terms, this one is your own personal guide to your own personal journey! Susan (who wrote a lot of our website's Library – be sure to check THAT out, too – it's such a valuable resource!), filled this book with charts to help you complete your own work, and she explains the directions and what you have to do – exactly! No more guessing. No more wishing you had examples. They're here for you. In order. Clear. Concise. Convincing. Just like the Level 4 Rubric. Hurry! This one talks exclusively about the Early Childhood/Generalist certificate area! You want this RIGHT NOW.

Available at Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/Susan-Carter-s-book-on-Amazon) or from the "Recommended Books" section in our website's Library, you'll want to get this one today!

Other certificate areas aren't left out. We have another author on our website! Bobbie Faulkner, author of "What Works! Successful Strategies in Pursuing National Board Certification", is also a member of ecgen.org! You can find her book on Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/BobbieFaulkner-sBookOnAmazon) and in our website's "Recommended Books" section of the Library. Bobbie's book came out last September, and was featured in a blog right here at that time (see September 2011 blog for more about her book).

The best National Board Certification candidate support if available right here on ecgen.org – no doubt about it! We're proud of our two authors and the books they have made available to candidates nationwide. Now you can have support right at your fingertips – at home – while you're working! Their books will guide you with the best support you could find anywhere – except right here on ecgen.org, of course! Come on in and join us here – our Forums are bursting with messages, we have live chats each weekend, and our Library is full of pertinent information every candidate should read!

Kelly Mueller

NBPTS score release time will be here within the next few weeks. Candidates-in-Waiting (CIWs) will soon learn if they become National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) this year or "not yet". EC-GEN, MC-GEN, and EC/MC Literacy candidates alike are waiting here on ecgen.org, and these are my suggestions to them to pass the time away.

1. Eat chocolate. It was good enough for you to do while you were completing the entries – so why not now, too?

2. Go to the Library on the ecgen.org website. In the first section ("General NB Documents"), read the documents in the "NBPTS parodies, poems, etc" section. LAUGH! (My personal favorite is the "Twelve Steps"…Perfect…and written by our own Lana H…now an NBCT but written when she was a candidate!)

3. Go to an amusement park and ride the roller coaster. You might as well get nauseated over something other than worrying about this.

4. Drink wine. (See #1.)

5. Buy a cookbook and try to find your kitchen. Your family (remember them?) will wonder what happened.

6. Write a lesson following KATERS* (see our ecgen.org Library's General NB Documents!) just for fun … not for any stupid portfolio entry!

*KATERS is our version of the National Board's Architecture of Accomplished Teaching. We think it's a lot easier to understand AND remember!

7. Blow a whistle and tell your family it's a fire drill. Once they've assembled, see if you can still remember each of their names. BONUS: Tell each person his/her date of birth (including year!).

8. Oversleep on Saturday. Heck. Oversleep on each Saturday in November!

9. Go to where your computer sits (office/dining room/wherever) with a huge box. (This may require multiple boxes!) Take ALL of that paper that is somehow connected to NB and pile it in the box. Put a lid on it. Literally. Have an army come help you move it (them) to the basement. Or the garage. Or the recycle center.**

**Except for those blessed Student Release Forms – you must keep them until eternity!

10. Mani/pedi. Should have been up with #1 and #4.

11. Tell your husband/wife/significant other/best friend that you really DO love him/her. You've just been going through a "stage" for the past year.

12. Breathe. Pat yourself on the back. You worked hard/did your best. Take a few days to simply be proud of yourself for what you HAVE accomplished. If you end up still needing to do a bit more – so be it. Trust me. The bulk is behind you. You've made a huge step toward this goal, and you WILL get there – this cycle, or soon. And we'll all be here with you – whenever!

Kelly M

Imagine having your own National Board Candidate Support Provider at your fingertips 24/7! Do not struggle alone! Whether you have a cohort with which to work or are the only National Board Candidate at your school, you'll benefit from using this book full of practical tips and written by one of our own trusted facilitators here at ecgen.org. She wrote this book to give National Board candidates like YOU a handy reference guide with user-friendly, succinct, insightful explanations. You'll find hundreds of suggestions to make your entries the clear, consistent, convincing writing they need to be. She explains "What Works" and "Why This Works" to demystify each entry and the Assessment Center. It is written in an easy to read conversational style. The book is loaded with templates and documents you can use immediately. The book can be used by National Board Candidates and Support Providers from any certificate area! 

Two years in the making, What Works! Successful Strategies for Pursuing National Board Certification by Bobbie Faulkner is now available! 

• Give yourself the advantage of this user-friendly resource.
• The newest, most up-to-date, comprehensive, affordable book for National Board Candidates on the market.
• Preview pages on amazon.com (taking pre-orders only through September). 
• For immediate delivery, order directly from the publisher at: www.rowmaneducation.com.

The price is the same on both amazon and the publisher sites: $29.95.

Give yourself an edge and order What Works! today! Spread the word and help a fellow candidate!

I can tell you from knowing Bobbie personally – and from reading her posts on this site, our old yahoo site, teachers.net and proteacher.com that I am happy to proudly endorse her book! She is a knowledgeable NBCT, trained as a Candidate Support Provider, and has worked with hundreds of candidates in her home state of Arizona as well as online through these various websites. Her information is thorough and easy to understand. You'll be glad to have this one as a personal reference! 

Contact Bobbie by writing to info@ecgen.org (please put "What Works!" in the subject line), by responding to any of her posts inside this website, or by writing to www.whatworks.nbct.yahoo.com for more information. 

Kelly Mueller

Congratulations to our Early Childhood Generalist (EC-GEN), Middle Childhood Generalist (MC-GEN), and Early and Middle Childhood Literacy (EC/MC Literacy) first time, advanced, and "Take One!" National Board candidates for completing their portfolios and sending them off to San Antonio! Our NBPTS "Renewal" candidates are still putting finishing touches on theirs, but those will soon be in the mail, too. Now it is time to turn our attention to the Assessment Center. It's NBPTS AC "Season"!

Our chat rooms are buzzing. We are in the tail end of our "Focus Chats" – and those transcripts will soon be joining the transcripts of the past 5-6 years in our Library. Now our candidates are making use of the chat rooms every night – putting into use what they have already learned from those Focus Chats. The Queen of the Assessment Center – our own Janet B (MS) – has whipped everyone into shape – and our candidates are feeling more and more that the AC will be something they can handle! Ms Clee has helped out with Play – and our own "sinetag" (Nancy B of CA) – the guru of the Big Ideas (Unifying Concepts) is stepping up once again to guide another candidate class through those pesky concepts this coming Thursday evening (April 21) in a chat specifically about them.

If you are searching for a way to understand the Assessment Center portion of the National Board process, come join us. That 40% of the process does NOT need to be a mystery. There ARE ways to prepare yourself for it! Be a part of our chats – post questions on our Forums. Be prepared when you get there! Join the group and study together!

Kelly M

"Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions" is a solidarity theme today. Many National Board Certified Teachers have joined other teachers and public workers across America today – this week – and hopefully for some time to come – to unite and have our voices be heard. You'll find us wearing red every Tuesday. You'll read us blogging wherever we can. It's "Move over WAITING FOR SUPERMAN - It's time for facts – and real teachers – to take the stage" time! This isn't about NEA – or AFT – or whether anyone agrees with every platform of either one of those organizations. This is about our teaching profession. Right now the only way we can respond to those speaking against us to join forces and speak in a unified voice. I believe our UNIONS will be the voice to do that.

I support unions not because of some militaristic mindset. The Jimmy Hoffa, back-room, dark alley picture that many people have of "unions" paints a picture I know nothing about. I support unions because of my personal experience with them. Just a few of those experiences include:

1. Several years ago I had a series of medical problems. Doctor orders kept me out of school for an extended period of time. My UNION negotiated health insurance paid hospital, ambulance, and doctor bills. My accrued sick leave paid me full salary during most of that time. Had my UNION not negotiated the sick leave and the ability to accrue it, I would have not only been sick, I would have been without a pay check. Once the sick leave pay ran out, I also had disability insurance – something available because of the UNION. That provided a sum close to my regular pay for the duration of my time out of work.

2. Because of those medical problems, I had to retire in 2007. Although I had taught for 38 years, only 21 of them were in my state. Our public school retirement system is touted as one of the strongest in the nation. We pay dearly into it – the current rate is 14% (you read that right). Teachers pay that much into it out of every pay check – and the School Board matches that. We put our money there – and have the School Board do the same – in lieu of current pay. It is to be for our retirement. I didn't fulfill my years of service to get "full retirement", but I get about half of what full retirement would be. That is, of course, in jeopardy should my state legislature decide it wants to get its hands on the money that was my pay – set aside for my retirement. My state UNION is standing guard to see that doesn't happen.

3. My state is one of the states (it's either 14 or 16 states that fall under this ridiculous rule) that does not allow us to collect both our public pension and Social Security. Mind you – I worked two jobs most of my teaching career to support my two children because my teaching job didn't pay enough! The Social Security I earned is not available to me, though, because I live in this state (unless I want to give up my public pension). I will be able to get about 30% of it, but that's all. My UNION (NEA) – on the national level – joins with AFT – working to get this reversed so that all 50 states are treated the same – so that anyone who  puts in to Social Security will receive what they have earned.

I'm many things professionally. Retired public school teacher, but far from 'retired'. Adjunct professor. National Board Certified Teacher. Candidate Support Provider. Website owner/moderator. I'm proud to add that I am a proud UNION member (NEA-Retired-Life). 

I support my fellow teachers across this country, whether they belong to a union, association, guild, or not. We ALL belong to the sister/brotherhood of teachers. We know there are wonderful things happening in our schools every day – and we know what those things are – and what makes them happen (and those things aren't related to test scores!). But our voices aren't being heard. We don't have an education problem in this country. We have a poverty problem. 22% of our children live in poverty. That's twice as many as in any of the other countries that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee and others want to compare our test scores to! None of them want to even talk about poverty – as if it has no bearing on why our children might test poorly!

I hope each of you will stand up and be heard in solidarity supporting our profession beginning today, too. To date the only voices we are hearing are the ones bashing our profession. That's because there has been no organized effort to support what we know needs to happen in our public schools. Our only chance at being heard is to join together in one voice. The organizations already in place to be that one voice for us are THE UNIONS! Please tell your local unions (or whatever your local association of teachers is called) to stand with us today and every day and say YES to the following 4 things:

 - Equitable funding for all public school communities

 - An end to high-stakes testing used for student, teacher, and school evaluation

 - Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

 - Teacher, family, and community leadership in forming public education policies.

For more information on this effort, please visit www.saveourschoolsmarch.org. If you don't have a local union, you can join us individually. I did. I'll hope to see you there!

Kelly Mueller

Our site is experiencing growing pains already! Due to requests from National Board candidates in both the Middle Childhood Generalist and Early/Middle Childhood Literacy certificate areas, we now have Forums dedicated specifically for each of them. Through word of mouth many have heard about the great support found here; they have asked to join to enjoy that same level of support. Those candidates are now joining and receiving support from all areas of our website!

We have National Board Certified Teachers who are MC-GEN, EC/MC Literacy, as well as all of our EC-GEN folks – each of whom already support candidates in all three of these certificate areas here, in other online communities, and in their local communities. Many of our support providers have taken the NBPTS Candidate Support Provider Training. We all provide support to each candidate even though the focus of the website remains Early Childhood Generalist.

Our website Library has documents that would benefit any candidate for National Board Certification – especially our sections on General NB Documents (including proofreading suggestions, our website's version of the Architecture of Accomplished Teaching, etc.), Entry writing Assistance (what needs to be in EVERY NB entry, the Instructional Context page, and the Contextual Information sheets, etc.), and Entry 4 help (the entry that is the same for every certificate area). Our Entry 3 documents are aimed at inquiry science and the "Big Ideas" (Unifying Concepts) – difficult but extremely important to this entry for both MC-GEN and EC-GEN.

Our chat rooms are busy 7 days a week. Our weekly chats on Saturday afternoon focus on one entry each week, but after that entry has been discussed the floor is opened to any/all entry discussions (from any certificate area). Also, we have nightly "check-in" chats at 9 p.m. Eastern Time. These are meant to be literally a place to 'check-in' with a quick question of just to vent – whatever you need!

Come join us – EC-GEN, MC-GEN, or EC/MC Literacy candidates and NBCTs! We're here – working hard – together! It's candidate frenzy time and we are ethically and collaboratively meeting the challenge here in our growing National Board community! Come be a part of it and grow with us!

Work with your style, not against it. Do you like a cycle-style or an outline? Do you like your schedules in a list or a grid? Are you a "big picture" or a "detail" person? Most candidates benefit from making a plan, creating a map or time-line, and getting organized. Doing this is a highly individualized process. Here are some tips to get you started:

 - Plan to read and study your standards. This should occur multiple times. Where in your process will you make time to do this?

 - Engage in conversation about the process. When can you do this? Make time for multiple conversations, formal and informal, with multiple groups of people.

 - Plan your academic year. Based on what you already know about your subject content, where will the key lessons that will fulfill the entry requirements fall within your NB time-line — still allowing yourself time to write about them?

 - Solicit feedback. When will you find time for revisions, editing, and sharing your written work with others for feedback?

 - Be interdependent and independent. Cultivate a balance between the two. Who can you contact and what resources do you need to gather to have the information, supplies, and equipment you need to be successful? When will you make these connections? What research can you do on your own to shore up your content and pedagogical knowledge?

 - Be realistic. Use what you already know about your own learning style and habits to your advantage.

 - Fight procrastination. It is your #1 enemy and will do more harm than good.

WHY THIS WORKS! Knowing how you work best, planning for it, and working steadily gives you the best chance of working smart.

(Editor's note: This is another of Bobbie F's great blogs. Thank you, Bobbie! We all benefit from your willingness to share your knowledge and time with us! Kelly M)

It's September, the time to get serious about spending time on all things National Board and working on your EC-GEN (Early Childhood/Generalist) portfolio. But so many things are swirling in your head that it's hard to decide where to start and how to know what is important. Try starting with the documents that should be your guides during your NB journey. They are the Heart and Soul of the National Board – your Power Package.

     Five Core Propositions

     NBPTS Standards

     Portfolio Instructions and Prompts

     Evaluation of Evidence Guide

     Architecture of Accomplished Teaching

WHAT WORKS: Read each document to distill the essence of its message.

     Understand that accomplished teaching is not accidental.

     Articulate that personal teaching behaviors and performances are identified by the NB and fully described in these support documents.

     Align what you do with how students are impacted.

     Use the Standards as reference points for accomplished practitioner decisions.

     Describe, analyze, and reflect on your practice in light of the accomplished profiles expressed in the standards.

WHY THIS WORKS: The written commentary must possess concrete examples of your current practice that demonstrates what you believe about your students and their learning, as well as the actions, strategies and choices you make. These examples serve as the "evidence" of your accomplished teaching for these students, in this setting, at this time.

There is a popular adage that says "You can never be too rich or too thin." In the NB world, the mantra is "You can never read the NB documents too often." When in doubt, always refer to the documents. No matter what advice you get from colleagues and/or support providers, the NB documents are always the trump card.

(Editor's note: Thanks to Bobbie F for this blog. Bobbie will be writing many of the blogs. I'm delighted to have her expert help! Thank you, Bobbie! We will all benefit from this collaboration!)

Welcome to new National Board early childhood/generalist (EC-GEN) candidates and NBCTs! We’re happy you’ve found us – and excited to get going with this year’s candidate ‘cycle’ here on ecgen.org.
Our Forums have been very quiet since the Assessment Center ‘season’ calmed down in June, but things are beginning to pick up again. Please join in by posting questions and comments in any of the Forums! You’ll find people are already asking questions about Entry 2 and 4. I’m sure the others will be close behind.
The top half of the Forum page IS designated for Candidate Support. Please don’t overlook the bottom half, though! It’s for ALL of us – for our Pre-K to Grade 3 ‘accomplished’ teaching practices. That would be the place to post questions/comments about those areas of your teaching practice (Pre-K to Grade 3 literacy, math, social studies, science, play, etc.). The purpose of this website is to support all of us as teachers as well as for NBCTs to support our National Board candidates.
Our Saturday chats are back in full swing. The first Saturday of the month we focus on Entry 1, the second Saturday on Entry 2, etc. The chat rooms (there are 2) are available 24/7 though, so other chats will soon be popping up, I’m sure!
Our Library is already well-stocked, but there will soon be new additions. One of those will be a new lesson plan blocked out using the KATERS plan (based on the 5 Corp Propositions of the NBPTS). We’re also hoping to build some ‘Renewal’ help, too.
I’ll hope to see you soon in the Forums and the chats! If you have a question, please contact me at info@ecgen.org.
Kelly M

Our blogs have not kept up with the pace inside the ECGEN website this year! Our Forums stayed very busy with National Board candidates, as did our chat room. The questions about the NBPTS certification process – and the discussions about those questions – covered every perspective you could think of! We came up with new ways to approach things, and tied them together with those trusty old ways, too. The Assessment Center "season" found our candidates studying NIGHTLY in the chat room – coming up with prompts for each of the exercises they would be facing. All in all I think it was a hugely successful "premier" for our website! Thanks to all who have been a part of our first year!

Keeping this blog going did get to be too much for me. Several of you gallantly came to my rescue and offered up blog contributions (yes, I still have them!), but even they didn't get uploaded! Good news! Bobbie F has volunteered to take it over for us! You will soon want to keep checking this spot each time you come to the website to see just what she has posted for us! I am turning over the blogs some of you wrote out for me that did not get posted last year. I am also sending her the list of folks who had said they might be interested in contributing a blog at some point. If YOU would be interested in contributing, please let me know at info@ecgen.org!

I look forward to seeing a variety of things posted here that will inform our teaching practices, be of help to candidates, and actually help all of us make better use of this ecgen.org website! Many thanks to Bobbie F for volunteering to make this happen!

And now….on to the 2010-2011 school year! I'll hope to "see" you all posting questions and comments in both the candidate and the "accomplished teaching" Forums. Our “CIWs” (Candidates-In-Waiting — candidates who have completed the process and are awaiting scores in November) will be available to help the new candidates, as will our NBCTs (National Board Certified Teachers). And, of course, I'll hope to "see" each of you in the weekly chats whenever you can attend.

Be well,

Kelly Mueller