FLAWED OR NOT, CERTIFICATION PROCESS HAS HAD AN IMPACT

Saturday, June 21, 2003

I have several times written columns critical of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards -- critical because, on the evidence of its own promotional literature, it has devoted itself to promoting the same destructive education theories so popular in teacher-training institutions.

As it happens, the organization's governing board is meeting in Denver this weekend, and members of its board stopped by to explain to me how the NBPTS has been redesigning its program for certifying teachers, both in response to critics and as a result of its own growing expertise.

``We're a listening organization,'' said Barbara Kelley, chair of the governing board. Joe Aguerrebere Jr., who became the organization's president about three months ago, added that he used to be skeptical too.

Well, I remain skeptical, but a little less so than before. There's research under way that aims to answer the crucial question, do the students of board-certified teachers learn more than similar students whose teachers are not board certified? But there is also evidence, if as yet mostly in the form of testimonials, that the application process itself improves teachers' skills, whether or not they become certified.

If so, the system might be beneficial overall even if it does little better than high SAT scores at identifying superior teachers.

Kelley and Aguerrebere brought with them Rhonda Naylor, mathematics coordinator at Campus Middle School in the Cherry Creek School District, who has no doubt about the value of the process. She earned her certification in mathematics for young adolescents (ages 11-15) and says that the process of applying for certification ``was the most powerful professional education I ever experienced.''

A major part of the certification process is a teacher's preparation of a portfolio demonstrating classroom skills. It includes videos of classes, a sampling of student work, interviews with students, evidence of outreach to parents -- 10 sections in all. Naylor said that preparing the portfolio, and studying the videotapes, helped her to pay more systematic attention to whether her students were learning.

Teaching has not been a reflective profession, Aguerrebere said, and that needs to change if it is to follow the medical model of clinical experience leading to board certification.

Naylor also talked about how the experience revitalized her passion for teaching. ``It kept me in the classroom,'' she said, instead of seeking recognition through a move to administration.

A frequent criticism of the certification process as originally administered was that it stressed pedagogy at the expense of content. No more, said Kelley. The portfolio, showing teachers responding to things that really happened, turned out to be better for assessing pedagogy than hypothetical exercises dreamed up for a written test. So in the last three years the on-site testing part of the certification process has been redirected toward content knowledge. It includes six 30-minute exercises each devoted to a specific content area for that certificate -- algebra, for instance, or geometry or data analysis, in Naylor's field.

Another criticism of the process has been that the portfolio requirements privilege some kinds of educational practices over others, especially traditional ones. Not so, Aguerrebere said. Teachers using Success for All (a highly structured reading program) or teaching in Core Knowledge schools can earn certification.

Kelley said that the 10 sections of the portfolio are all assessed separately, so no one assessor's pedagogical preferences determine a candidate's fate. Teachers who apply to be assessors -- they needn't be certified themselves -- have four full days of training, learning to match their scores to the standards for that section. They train on portfolios of both successful and unsuccessful applicants using a variety of teaching styles in a variety of schools, so they can learn to set their own preferences aside.

After training, the assessors go on to two weeks of reading applicants' portfolios. About a quarter of them, chosen at random, are scored by two people (the trainer reads them too), and a certain number of previously scored entries are fed through the system to monitor whether an assessor is drifting away from the standards. Assessors might read seven or eight sections a day, taking extensive notes. Candidates who score poorly on a section can work on identified weaknesses and resubmit that section.

Assessors tend to internalize the standards they're trained on, Naylor said, and that influences how they teach when they return to school in the fall. And candidates get together to talk about their portfolios.

``We watch each other's videos,'' she said.

Kelley said the national board, which was started in 1987, was the first to gain widespread acceptance of the idea that it was OK to pay better teachers more, by providing a mechanism to determine who they were. Even if the mechanism is flawed, she is absolutely right about the impact of that idea on the teaching profession.