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At this point in the year, candidates are writing and revising their written commentaries for National Board certification components, and they’ve heard a lot of advice about how to save space—some of which leave the writing almost unreadable. It’s not because the ideas and information aren’t good, but in general, candidates aren’t really ready for the information and don’t understand the reasons behind the advice.  Here’s what you need to know about writing to achieve National Board certification.

Start by writing your first draft of whichever component you’re on; begin by copying and pasting the prompts into a Word document and then answering the questions as clearly as possible below them. Then follow these tips to make your writing clear and concise.

Tip #1— Edit for content before using abbreviations

Before you begin using abbreviations like Sts for students, or the & sign rather than the word “and,” go through the prompts and make sure you’ve answered all of them. Take out any information that doesn’t answer one of the prompts. Go through your answers and look for statements to which someone could ask “Why do you say that?” or “How do you know?” In this case, you’ve been vague and you need to add a concrete example.

To ensure that your writing is concise and relevant, watch this video from Dr. Jenny Santilli, NBCT.

Now that you have thoroughly answered your prompts, used specific examples, and learned to be more succinct—now you can begin to look for space saving techniques.

Tip #2— Look for redundancies

For example, get rid of the double spaces after ending punctuation. 

Another example is using words that aren’t needed to convey the meaning. I used the word “that” too much. I’d write, “I thought that Student A needed more time to work.” It was easy enough to look for all the “thats” and take them out. The sentence reads as well when I write, “I thought Student A needed more time to work.”

One teacher wrote: “I teach grades 9-12 in a public school. I teach Algebra, Geometry, and Consumer Math.” She could easily combine the sentences to say, “I teach Algebra, Geometry, and Consumer Math, grades 9-12 in a public school.” Combining these sentences saved eight spaces. 

Once you’ve identified the places where you are typing unnecessarily repetitive keystrokes, you are ready to begin saving space with smaller words.

Tip #3— Use smaller words and shorter phrases

My best tip is to take out the words “and” or “but” and use a semicolon. For example, “In my classroom we value every student’s opinion; we listen before we speak” replaces “In my classroom we value every student’s opinion, and we listen before we speak.” When you find appropriate ways to join independent clauses, you will likely find that you’ve saved twenty to forty spaces in your writing.

When you re-read your work, look for long phrases that can be replaced with one word. “As well as” can be replaced with “and.” If you’ve used a plethora of words (change that to “a lot” of words) in an explanation, you can use a thesaurus to find a shorter word.  Isn’t it interesting that we can use the skills we once used to make our writing more elaborate to make our writing less so? We are using the thesaurus to look for less impressive words. Another example is in the first sentence of this paragraph. I could have written “As you re-read your work” and saved two spaces.

Educational jargon can sometimes be simplified. For example, which is shorter, “our state’s summative assessment” or “our state’s end-of-year test?”  You can save 4 spaces here. Look for opportunities to choose shorter words and phrases. 

The first time you use an educational term like Common Core Standards (CCS), you can put the abbreviation in parentheses and then use that abbreviation thereafter rather than write it out each time. Whole-brain teaching (WBT) is another example.

Tip #4— Use numbers rather than writing out their names 

Here we are again, undoing all those rules our English teachers taught us. If you can, follow the English mechanics rules. However, if you need to, you can write that you teach 4 sections of Spanish 1, rather than four. As an aside, did you notice that I used a 1 rather than the Roman numeral “I” for Spanish I? The reason we are being careful about abbreviations is that we want clarity.  Spanish I might not be the perfect example, but hopefully you can see what I mean by deciding what looks and reads more clearly.

Tip #5— Write well if you are an English teacher

Although we say you can flout the rules of English mechanics in writing for the National Board, this won’t work if you are an English teacher. English teachers historically have the lowest NBCT pass rates. Assessors of English education cannot look the other way as you butcher your own content area. Writing well is actually a part of being an accomplished ELA teacher. This doesn’t mean you write literature to submit to the National Board; you submit a good piece of technical writing that answers all the prompts. It means you back up your claims with evidence.

Tip #6— Strive to be clear

Clarity is the rule to worry about most. If an assessor hails from a different state than you, he may not be familiar with some of the terminology or names you use. If a font makes a word look odd, perhaps look for ways to make sure it’s clear. And don’t stress over that or take it too far, please.

Finally, If you find you need more space, you can begin to abbreviate names (Student A becomes SA; Robert becomes R; students could become sts.) 

Besides fonts or unusual terms that aren’t clear, I have seen candidates trying to abbreviate to save space to the point that their paper is distracting.  

For example, one teacher wrote: “12 sts age 9-10. Math Cncpts. CCS.4.1.2 numberlines & plc value.”

What a struggle for an assessor to read 13 pages like this! 

There is a reason we have been taught to write well, and that reason is to communicate.  Although assessors are taught to ignore poor writing and to try to power through difficult papers, they are only human and you are doing yourself a disservice if you use too many distracting abbreviations. If you’ve made the effort with tips 1-4, you will not need to chop up your paper in an awkward way. 

So here is the gist of this post--please try to communicate the answers to your prompts and your evidence to the assessor in a clear, consistent and convincing manner. The best method for saving space is to get rid of sentences that don’t have a purpose and to tighten your writing so each sentence means exactly what you need it to mean with the fewest words and letters possible.

This process is rigorous and causes us to think very deeply. Many revisions is the norm. You’ve got this.

If you need more information about writing for the National Board, we have an entire chapter about it in our book, Mapping Your National Board Journey.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

If the percentage of candidates who achieve National Board Certification for Teachers the first time they attempt their components is still 30-40% (rumored in the old system) then chances are you need to retake a component or two. Now you are faced with trying to decide how to improve your National Board scores.

Improve Your Evidence

Some of the candidates I’ve spoken with are quoting feedback that asks if their evidence could be more clear, more consistent, or more convincing. So let’s talk about that.

First of all, what qualifies as evidence? For C2,  you are making claims about your ability to teach a sequence of instruction—and what I am seeing is that candidates can be vague.  What do I mean by that, you ask? Exactly. An example would be much more clear to you. And examples about how you know a student needs more instruction would be more clear than if you said something like, “I could tell that Student A needed more explanation.” Maybe you could say, “As I helped Student A determine the name and formula for a chemical compound, I could tell that he was confusing ionic and covalent compounds.” The second statement is more clear than the first statement as evidence that I am monitoring and managing student learning.

Secondly, you are submitting student work as evidence. Rather than expect the assessor to examine the evidence and come to the same conclusions you do, can you say something like, “When I look at R’s diagram of the water cycle in Work Sample #1, I see that he has written ‘condensation’ in the area of the ocean. I can see that he is confusing accumulation with condensation.” This is more clear about what evidence I am claiming.  It’s also important that assessors can see your feedback to students on the assignments you submit. Or you can include the rubric where you’ve written feedback.

With regard to consistency, we cannot always be pointing to the same evidence to support every prompt that is asked of us. Consistency will be shown in more than one piece of evidence that points to the same skill. Unfortunately it seemed like one piece of evidence was all I had to work with twelve years ago when I first certified. I achieved because of some higher scores on other entries, but in one of my videos, my answer to almost every prompt pointed to the one pitiful piece of evidence I could pick out. I did the best I could with that video. The other video was stronger. (Is there a text abbrieviation for Laughing At Myself? LAM?)

My own rule of thumb, and not one I’ve seen anywhere, is to try to show every criteria on a prompt three times. So if the evidence I’m asked for is that I have used correct science pedagogy to teach a major concept in science, I will try to find three ways I used appropriate and current science pedagogy and point those out. This is what I’m equating with consistency.

For example, “I often use the 5E model to plan lessons so I began the activity by engaging students in making observations of rock samples.” …then later in the paragraph or paper as appropriate… “I used an engineering design  activity in which students...”  and even later in the paper… “Because lab safety is very important in science class, I...”

These examples will be even more obvious and easy for an assessor to find if I “pull my points” as we are taught to do in debate class. Not only giving those three examples, but prefacing each example with information that these are my examples of appropriate science pedagogy.  So it would look like this:

My choices of science pedagogy include use of the 5E instructional model. For example, I began the activity by engaging students in making observations of rock samples… later in the paper I would write… another way I used appropriate science pedagogy was through the use of the science engineering practice of redesigning solutions to a problem.” … later… “One pedagogical practice I always include is going over lab safety rules that specifically pertain to the lab we are doing.”

Lastly, your evidence needs to be convincing. Several of the Level 4 rubrics contrast the word convincing with the word “contrived.” Does what you are using for evidence seem natural or did you have to work to make it fit? Is it weak evidence? Here’s an example from C3:  “In the video you can tell students understand the concept of covalent bonding because they have put the models together correctly.”  A stronger piece of evidence than students who can follow instructions putting models together might be:  “In the video at minute 3:42, you can hear the girl in the red shirt say to her partner, ‘We need to attach two hydrogen atoms to the oxygen atom because the oxygen atom has two unpaired electrons.” Many of the Level 4 rubrics for C3 specifically ask for student learning conversations as evidence. There are many ways to design your instruction to provide for student learning conversations. Here’s another resource from Cult of Pedagogy.

Revisiting the Four Tips

So to recap the thoughts in this post: 1) use specific examples as evidence, 2) point to specific answers or writing on the students’ papers as evidence, 3) pull your points by using question stems from the prompt to mark the evidence for the assessors, 4) realize that you may need to re-write or re-record video until you get material that will demonstrate your accomplished teaching.  If you have time to get better evidence, take it.

There is one more thought I have about evidence and I will need your help to double check the instructions. I think you can use text boxes or post-its, etc. to mark the places on the student work that you want the assessor to note. Please let me know if there is something that says you can’t do that anymore, but in the olden days, you could. So I would put a sticky arrow next to the results of an assessment (for example, in C4) that showed an increase in student test scores.

A cool part of the National Board process is that it’s a growth process. I hope you will enjoy seeing yourself grow in your ability to provide evidence to the NBPTS, and that there will be even more of an a-ha moment as you compare your work with the Level 4 Rubric for your content area.  

The Bonus Material

If you go to the Resources pages on this website, I’ve uploaded a chart I made for a candidate in the online cohort from the AYA Math Level 4 rubric. Use this as an example of what you can do with your own rubric from your nbpts instructions.

Hope this helps.