Successful Strategies for Pursuing National Board Certification by Bobbie Faulkner

Author:Bobbie Faulkner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chapter 6

Component 4: Effective and Reflective Practitioner

You know you are a National Board candidate when: you must have a dictionary beside you to decipher and interpret the prompts.

OVERVIEW

Component 4 focuses on your ability to use reflection to effectively develop knowledge of your students and apply that knowledge to assessment practices to move their learning forward. You’ll gather information from a variety of sources, including assessments, and collaborate with colleagues and the larger community to impact your students’ learning. The information you submit, the sources of this information, and how you use it will be specific to your subject area and the unique characteristics of the students you teach, school, district, and community. Just a note of caution: if you know someone who had certified under the PREVIOUS process before the 2016–2017 cycle, YOUR Component 4 will be very different from the Entry 4 they had done.

What Do You Need To Do?

Component 4 asks you to focus on your knowledge of students, use of assessments, participation in learning communities, collaboration, and reflection. You will:

• collect relevant information from families/caregivers, the larger community, colleagues, and other sources to describe and build a profile of a group of students.

• choose assessments on the basis of your knowledge of students gathered from collaborations and multiple sources, the learning objectives of the unit you teach, and your understanding of sound assessment principles and practices.

• analyze your assessment practices to explain how they have a positive impact on student learning.

• reflect on the effectiveness of your assessment practices to improve student learning.

• submit examples of assessments used for formative and summative purposes.

• provide evidence that you use assessment data to positively impact student learning.

I am struck by how this is a microscopic look at how a candidate might follow the AAT. The AAT is the National Board version of an accomplished lesson/unit plan and is highly valued within the scoring process.

The Five Elements of Component 4

Five elements run through Component 4 and will form the basis for much of your written commentary and the evidence you’ll submit. These elements are:

• Knowledge of students

• Generation and use of assessment data

• Participation in learning communities

• The inclusion of collaboration within the above elements

• Reflection

Together these elements make up what is known as Assessment Literacy.

What Is Assessment Literacy?

Assessment Literacy can be defined as understanding how to use assessment for learning with this group of students, at this time, and in this setting; how to interpret assessment results; knowing what makes an effective assessment; how to apply assessment information to refine your teaching and maximize student learning; and reflecting on the effectiveness of your instruction and the assessment to measure student learning. Assessment is a tool that should be in every teacher’s toolbox. It can help answer the question, “Am I teaching effectively and are my students learning what they need to?” An analogy for assessment ILLITERACY would be to compare it to asking a doctor or nurse to do their job without knowing how to interpret patients’ charts. Assessment LITERACY supports improvement of teaching and learning.

Knowledge of Students

• Refer to

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