May Cohort Meetings

We will have a general cohort meeting on May 2nd (yes, it's a Wednesday) at Nutter Fort Primary School, and a Submitting Our Materials Celebration on May 15th at Bridgeport High School.

In the past, candidates have brought snacks to share to the Celebration, as well as their own coffee or water, soda, etc.  If you need last minute help on May 15th, we will be there for that, too.

How to Upload Your Components to NBPTS

By Joetta M. Schneider, NBCT

Uploading your National Board components works the same way for both first time and renewal candidates.  The submission window for National Board Certification will open around April 1st, and you will receive notification from NBPTS about that via email if you have a candidate number.  If you don’t find that email within a week of April 1st, you will need to email them or check your spam folder.  Although you don’t have to submit your materials until midnight on May 16th, it’s helpful to understand how the e-portfolio site works before you actually need to upload.

When you get to the site you will need to register for an account with the email voucher code you receive from the NBPTS.  The Tutorials are excellent, and include information about how to compress and submit your videos for Mac, PC, and iMovie.  

Many candidates wonder how to get their evidence and written commentaries into the same file.  What I did was take pictures of my learners’ work and import them into my Word document.  Then I exported the file to PDF.  Others scanned their evidence and inserted it into a document.  

Another method for combining your evidence and writing would be to use an app like Tiny Scanner on your phone or iPad; you can create a PDF from a picture.  If your written commentary is in PDF form, you can open the files in preview and drag and drop the thumbnail images from the sidebar to combine PDFs. One nice thing to know is that you can upload your files now, or as you complete them, but then remove them and add different files before the submission deadline.  Just don’t “submit” until you are ready.  If there are files in your e-portfolio, but you haven’t submitted your work by midnight on May 16th, those files will be automatically submitted at that time.  

Do you have any tips for candidates about submitting their work?  Leave them in the comments!  

A Component 4 Tip from Amy

You will find "Learning Portfolio Related Terms" around page 11 of this document. I found it helpful that specific words such as "formative assessment" "student self assessment" and "summative assessment" "whole-class discussions" are defined here.  Reading these definitions may help to spring board your thinking in the correct direction to provide evidence. Have a great day! 

Amy 

http://www.nbpts.org/wp-content/uploads/NB_general_portfolio_instructions.pdf

Has anyone else loved this cool graphic? (click here)

To Submit Your Components to the National Board when the Window Opens...

You may have already received information about how to submit your components to the National Board when the submission window opens on April first, as well as information about how to register for your account on the submission website.  If not, that email will be coming soon from the NBPTS.  If you don't get that information, contact Instructional Specialist, Amy Hinkle or any of your advanced cohort members, who will help you.  (I will be out for a few of weeks due to my mom's illness, which she's doing better, thank you for the inquiries!)  We will also be scheduling a cohort meeting at each location in April.

Although the submission window is opening, you still have almost six weeks to upload and submit your materials.  Don't worry.  You can upload files and then take them back off the site and upload different files until midnight of May 16th.  Nothing is sent in until you hit the SUBMIT button.  But whatever is there will automatically be submitted at midnight on May 16th.

Hope to see you at the dinner on April 19th.  Email Connie Bowers if interested.

Joetta

Congrats to an NBCT Candidate!

The Power of the Cohort

At Thursday's meeting a candidate exclaimed, "I feel like this meeting and the last meeting have been so amazing!  They've brought everything together for me!  Next year you should start with these two meetings!"  This is the power of the cohort in National Board certification, and it's the "aha moment" we've needed.  You all are doing it!  :-)

The power of these two meetings were the investment of the candidates who brought their videos and their feedback to the discussion.  In the first meeting, referenced above, we dissected the instructions for our Component 3 (the notes from that meeting are here.)  The second meeting was on February 8th, where two candidates showed their videos and asked for feedback.  The group as a whole watched the videos and took turns comparing each video to the rubric.  We then brainstormed tweaks to the video (use of different technology, what level of engagement we could see in the video, etc.) as food for thought to the candidates.

Another candidate said, "You know, I wanted to start my video, but I didn't even know where to start!  But now I understand how to begin."

Facilitators and mentors are not allowed, ethically, to show you our videos, but candidates helping each other with feedback is not only allowed, but encouraged.  You are not going to reproduce what others do, but you are going to have insights into your own teaching as you apply ideas you've discussed.  At this point your understanding of the process and of teaching strategies and student engagement have become exponentially deeper.

One of the candidates who brought his video is very close to his "a-ha moment."  It was easy to see the light in his eyes as he began discussing his teaching and his classroom in the context of the feedback from his cohort members; because of his cohort members, he is now ready to leap tall buildings!

I want to mention that none of this would be possible without the mentoring of the advanced candidates from cohort class #1.  They have shared feedback from their process and helped your facilitators understand the new process in important details and the scoring.  They are the ones that held steady during the agonizingly slow roll-out by the NBPTS and braved the first wave of scoring.  They are the ones (nationally) who have helped NBPTS make the tweaks to the process just last month.  In danger of losing the superhero theme because I'm switching to Star Wars, now:

“Never tell me the odds!” — Han Solo

Those were our brave first class of candidates who had to go into this blindly--no one in the nation had yet completed the process.

So, with all this information and learning under our belts (would those be superhero belts or Jedi utility belts?) we prepare for our Component 4 intensive--to make it just as amazing!

And before that, we have a second meeting (with the same content as the one that began this blog post) on Thursday, February 15th, at BHS.  You're doing it!

Stay Awesome! 

February Cohort Meeting Dates

February 8th 3:30-5:30 at NFP

February 15th 3:30-5:30 at BHS

Component 4 Intensive February 21st* at BHS

*I will confirm the February 21st date after February 13th when our guest speaker confirms that date.