Celebrate!

Scores will be returned soon... our renewal NBCTs received theirs last week.  Three of them passed!  That’s important because they don’t redo just a section like first timers do.  My experience is that renewal is also easier than the first certification because we’ve done it before, but just as much a reason to celebrate!

If you or a teacher you know achieves NBCT status, please let me know so we can honor them at the dinner in April.

What if you are too modest or don’t want to be honored?  I would ask you to do it for the team...for me and the mentors as well as your peers who’ve invested as well as hoped for the best for you; for the cause of increasing NBCT awareness. If you can fit it into your busy schedule.  If you just can’t, it’s okay, of course, we can honor you in absentia.

If you are a first time submitter who has to resubmit a Component, congratulations on what you’ve accomplished so far!  If you had us read for you and you were WAY off track we would have told you.  Be brave and persevering just like you want YOUR star students to be.  Set your cap.  Utilize chat boards, discussion boards, and mentors.  Realize it’s not you, there are many reasons you might need to re-do... the difficulty of getting the right video, etc.  I can and will tell you a million reasons you might not achieve this first time.  How about, “They rolled out Component 4 in November!”  You could have had three more months on Component 4 if you’d waited till this year to start it.  But no, brave souls, you jumped in to test the waters!  Thank you.

So we celebrate all your success— privately.  Passed most of it? Awesome.  Passed any of it? Good job.  It’s a developmental process— stay open to it.  Some of us learned to walk a few months later than others, but we walk just as well as they do now.  Same thing; if you need a few more months to achieve, take it.  Your final efforts will probably be a higher total score than someone who achieved the first year, because the more times you do it, the better you get.  I loved our very first ever meeting when I started.  We went around the room telling National Board stories and one NBCT said she hadn’t made it on her first try.  I thought, “How important it was for her to say that!”  With a first time pass rate of 30-40%, wasn’t that important for potential candidates to hear?

Enough encouragement?  Call if you need anything!    I’ll be sending out an anonymous survey monkey for scores and feedback in January so we can fine tune our support.