I Failed National Board Certification
Okay - I guess it's more reasonable to say that I didn't pass, since I still have two whole years to redo the parts of my national boards process that were below standard.
But holy cow does it suck.
I needed 275 points to pass. I earned 274. One point.
One point that would have saved me hundreds of dollars (when I've already spent thousands) and hours of time (when the process already cost me 120 hours last year).
My initial reaction was a desire to throw up.
National Boards is such a unreasonably intensive process that the idea of having to redo any of it is really hard to accept. And, like a lot of the ways teachers are evaluated, a large chunk of that time is spent doing things that have nothing to do with teaching - e.g. scanning documents, figuring out how to convert one type of file into another so it can be uploaded onto the national boards website, or reading through the hundreds of pages that outline how entries are to be written.
In some ways it is a great example of what authentic assessment should look like. There are lots of rubrics, a whole book of standards to go along with the products candidates are supposed to create, and painstakingly detailed descriptions of the way candidates are supposed to go out putting their
But holy cow does it suck.
I needed 275 points to pass. I earned 274. One point.
One point that would have saved me hundreds of dollars (when I've already spent thousands) and hours of time (when the process already cost me 120 hours last year).
My initial reaction was a desire to throw up.
National Boards is such a unreasonably intensive process that the idea of having to redo any of it is really hard to accept. And, like a lot of the ways teachers are evaluated, a large chunk of that time is spent doing things that have nothing to do with teaching - e.g. scanning documents, figuring out how to convert one type of file into another so it can be uploaded onto the national boards website, or reading through the hundreds of pages that outline how entries are to be written.
In some ways it is a great example of what authentic assessment should look like. There are lots of rubrics, a whole book of standards to go along with the products candidates are supposed to create, and painstakingly detailed descriptions of the way candidates are supposed to go out putting their
