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| The NBPTS architecture of accomplished teaching reference. |
As I reviewed the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' new guideline, What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do, I realized that it is a perfect guideline to use to build strong teaching/learning teams, teams that will eventually become #nbctstrong since this approach will lead every team member to national board certification which in turn will ensure that every team member is connected to a national team of accomplished educators who will bring support and strength to their individual practice and collegial efforts to teach every child well.
As I think about this, it seems to me that it is in the best interest of educational administrators to foster National Board of Professional Teaching Standards certification for all members of their teaching/learning communities as this certification process is a personalized and collective approach to developing practice in ways that matter significantly. If school administrators could say that all or most of their professional educators are nationally board certified or NBCTs, they could say that they have a teaching staff that's accomplished, connected, dedicated and successful at teaching every student--imagine how powerful that would be.
In light of that, I evaluated our TeamFive, my teaching/learning team, with the five propositions in an earlier post, and now I'll evaluate our teamwork with the NBPTS research related to embedding the propositions in action.
The NBPTS image of the architecture of the five propositions above is an amazing timeline for PLCs and grade-level/subject-area efforts.
First, know your students. How do you and your team do this at the start of the year in ways that matter and ways that demonstrate dignity and awareness of the whole child (not just a set of scores).
Second, how do you and your team set goals that matter? What does this process look like? This is an area where the hosting conversations research could be embedded to foster inclusive, transparent, respectful process, protocols and result. Collegial circles is another approach that may work well here. What processes do you use related to this in the system where you teach?
Third, implement instruction, and 4th, 5th, 6th, regularly assess, reflect and revise/modify/enrich as needed.
As I think of the system where I work and team, I believe our efforts with regard to goal setting is where we can make better gains with regard to deep learning and teaching. Architecturally I believe we have embedded the steps outlined by NBPTS, but can pay greater attention to step two so that we are working with really rich, deep, evolving and developing goals/vision for teaching and learning.
