National Board For Professional Teaching Standards Research Articles

Linking national standards: A reflective process

This article describes the reflective process used by a group of early childhood faculty members to study national standards in order to improve their teacher education program. The standards studied included those from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children (DEC/ECE). The reflective process and study resulted in changes in field experiences, course requirements and activities and assisted in state and national accreditation.

Minneapolis SLPs to Receive Salary Increase

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderSchool Matters1 Oct 2001Minneapolis SLPs to Receive Salary Increase Mary M. Annett Mary M. Annett Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.SCM1.06192001.1 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Proving the impact advocacy can have for school-based clinicians, ASHA-certified speech-language pathologists in the Minneapolis Public Schools are scheduled to receive a salary increase of more than $1,500 next month. The annual increase was secured not through legislative victory, but through advocacy at the district level as the Minneapolis SLPs demonstrated the value of their CCCs in the Medicaid billing process. Frank Cirrin explains that he and other ASHA-certified Minneapolis SLPs began advocating for a boost in their salaries--similar to the recognition teachers receive if they are certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS)--in January 1998 through presentations to their union (Education Minnesota, an affiliate of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association) and district. “We wanted our ASHA CCCs to be recognized as equivalent to the national certification for classroom teachers,” Cirrin says. “National certification for teachers is encouraged and recognized in the contract in a number of important ways, including an advance of one lane on the salary schedule--approximately $1,550 in our district.” To demonstrate their case, Cirrin says the Minneapolis SLPs provided side-by-side comparisons of the ASHA and NBPTS certificates and used ASHA’s guidebook on state salary supplements to help document equivalent training and rigor. “Working through the district’s process, we made six presentations over two years,” he says. “At one point, we collaborated with occupational therapists, physical therapists, school psychologists, and others to suggest contract language that we thought would be a fair solution. However, there was little progress on resolving this issue. “The situation changed almost two years ago when our district started to bill Medicaid for health-related IEP services, including speech-language services,” Cirrin explains. “As I understand it, our state requires ASHA CCCs (or equivalent) for third-party billing, but doesn’t require CCCs to be a school-based SLP. We saw this as an opportunity to pursue a salary increase for our voluntary national certification without arguing about whether our ASHA CCCs are identical to teachers’ NBPTS certification. With the advice of the union, we felt confident that our ASHA CCCs had value as the district began to collect much needed reimbursement to support students in special education.” As it became evident how much reimbursement the district stood to gain by having ASHA-certified SLPs fully participate in third-party billing, the union and district signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) in June providing a salary schedule lane change to ASHA-certified SLPs who also provide services to students through third-party billing. “This salary increase is consistent with current contract language on the benefits of achieving NBPTS certification,” Cirrin says. Cirrin credits much of their success to support from the district’s director of special education and other administrators for recognition of advanced professional certification. “In fact, the special education administrators worked to broaden the MOA to include educational audiologists, OTs, PTs, school psychologists, school social workers, and school nurses who perform third-party billing activities and who hold advanced national certificates in their respective fields,” he adds. But the Minneapolis SLPs’ advocacy efforts have not ended with this salary increase. “Our efforts continue,” Cirrin says. “District SLPs are working with the union and the district to change the contract, so that the ASHA CCCs are recognized on their own merits without being tied to third-party billing.” The salary increase is expected to take effect Nov. 1 and will be retroactive to September 2000. Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetailsCited byPerspectives on Swallowing and Swallowing Disorders (Dysphagia)9:4 (126-134)1 Dec 2008Perceptions of Job Stress and Satisfaction Among School-Based SLPs: Challenges Versus RewardsLena G. Caesar and Nickola Wolf Nelson Volume 6Issue 19October 2001 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Oct 1, 2001 Metrics Current downloads: 119 Topicsasha-topicsleader_do_tagasha-article-typesleader-topicsCopyright & Permissions© 2001 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...

Reforming Teacher Education

In the media and in public policy discussions, there is intensified emphasis on the quality of public education and the nation's teaching force. Teacher preparation in particular has received enormous attention as part of highly publicized and politicized efforts to get tough about results and standards with concentrated pressure on the higher education institutions that prepare teachers either to get better at teaching or get out of the business. Current pressures on teacher education have bite as well as bark, with some of the teeth provided by new mandatory Title II reporting, which will affect eligibility for federal funding and result in a federal report card on the states and on teacher preparation institutions. It is useful to note that there are at least three agendas driving reforms in teacher education at national and/or state levels: the professionalization agenda, the deregulation agenda, and what some people are calling the over-regulation agenda. Although overlapping in certain ways--with the degree of overlap dependent in part on the regulations and professional relationships established by individual states--these three agendas are also competing and even contradictory in other ways. The professionalization agenda for reforming teacher education is part of efforts during the past several decades to establish a professional knowledge base for teaching and teacher education and on efforts by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) to professionalize teacher education. Particularly influential on the current professionalization agenda was the publication of What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future [NCTAF], 1996) and the materials and initiatives that followed it. Spearheaded by NCTAF and Linda Darling- Hammond, key professional organizations are now collaborating on a common national system of teacher preparation and development based on professional consensus and high standards for teacher preparation, initial teacher licensing, and board certification of experienced teachers. Alongside the professionalization agenda, however, is the well-publicized and now well-known movement to deregulate teacher education by dismantling teacher education institutions to break up the monopoly that the profession has too long enjoyed. Spearheaded by conservative political groups and foundations such as the Fordham Foundation and the Pioneer Institute, deregulationists assert that the requirements of teacher preparation programs and state licensing agencies present unnecessary hurdles that keep bright young people out of teaching and focus on social goals rather than academic achievement. Chester Finn's Fordham Foundation, which frames its agenda in explicit opposition to professionalization, advocates alternate routes into teaching and high-stakes, state-level teacher tests as the primary gatekeepers into the profession (Kanstoroom & Finn, 1999). Although some of these tests have been criticized for their poor technical quality, their inconsistency with teacher education curricula, and/or their lack of validity as predictors of either teaching practice or student achievement, tests are generally accepted as public evidence that teachers are (or are not) meeting high standards. In addition to high-stakes tests, most states across the country now have additional new regulations intended to reform curricula, programs, and policies for teacher preparation at higher education institutions. In some states, new regulations are largely in sync with the professionalization agenda, focusing on performance-based assessments of teacher candidates that are linked to INTASC and NBPTS standards. In other states, however, new regulations represent unprecedented moves to establish external control of nearly every aspect of teacher preparation, including allowable arts and sciences majors, amount and content of education course work, quality and kind of subject matter preparation, and extent and type of fieldwork experiences that teacher candidates have in schools. …

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: Force or Farce for Masters of Education Programs?

This paper discusses the foundation and growth of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). It also examines the benefits and requirements of the NBPTS and how these standards may affect the continuum of teacher education programs, particularly with regard to aligning the programs to the five propositions. Current studies advocating change in masters programs in institutions of higher education are reviewed. A summary of revisions and considerations made by several universities is also provided. Web sites are also provided for up-to-date information.

Composing Standards and Composing Teachers

This article considers whether National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification may be as much an evaluation of a teacher’s writing about his or her teaching as it is an evaluation of the teaching itself. The experiences of two NBPTS certification candidates are explored. As a theoretical background, an analysis of writing difficulties in NBPTS portfolio entries is performed. The candidates’ experience with the certification process is then interpreted through that theoretical lens to show how each teacher “composed” her teaching. The article concludes that rhetorical skill is a problematic, unarticulated standard of the board.

The Meaning of National Board Certification for Middle Grades Teaching

The mission of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is to establish high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do, to develop and operate a national, voluntary system to assess and certify teachers who meet these standards, and to advance related educational reforms for the pur pose of improving student learning in American schools. (National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, 2001). Wholly supporting these goals, I decided to pursue National Board Certification. This decision was made after teach

Examining the Psychometric Quality of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Early Childhood/Generalist Assessment System.

The purpose of the study was to examine the psychometric quality of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) Early Childhood/Generalist assessment system. Rating data from the 1997–1998 assessment were analyzed using the FACETS (Linacre, 1998) computer program. The assessment system's 10 exercises work together to define a unidimensional accomplished teaching variable. There is little evidence of multidimensionality in the data, and none of the exercises appear to function in a redundant manner. The exercise set succeeds in defining several statistically distinct levels of accomplished teaching among the candidates. Overall, most candidate rating profiles show consistent performance across the exercises. While assessors differed somewhat in severity, most used the 12-point rating scale consistently. Although the range in assessor variability tends to be moderate, assessor severity does influence the number of candidates that can bank individual exercises. (If a candidate's total scaled score does not meet or exceed the NBPTS performance standard of 275, the candidate can bank scores on exercises in which the candidate received a final score of 2.75 or greater. If the candidate reapplies for certification in the next three years, the candidate does not have to retake banked exercises.)

Higher Education Culture—A Fit or Misfit With Reform in Teacher Education?

Collaboration and innovation in teacher education are essential ingredients for preparing teachers for increasingly diverse and challenging school populations. In the United States, one in five children lives in poverty, and the numbers of children who speak English as a second language are increasing rapidly (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997). If institutions of higher education are to prepare teachers for all students, current program structures and faculty roles must change substantially. Current practice, however, shows less than dramatic change. Some advocates of teacher education reform have cited funding patterns in schools of education, adherence to horizontal staffing of faculty assigned to specialized course loads, lack of public school teacher involvement, and an absence of a moral and ethical imperative throughout the program as barriers that continue to prevent reform and growth in teacher education (Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, & Watson, 1998; Tom, 1997). State policies allowing alternative certification, limiting the number of credit hours in teacher education programs, and prescribing discrete teaching behaviors in the evaluation of teaching also continue to impede program change (Darling-Hammond, 1996). Some faculty may perceive such state policies, along with other regulatory influences such as the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), as constraining program development in teacher education rather than as guides for quality. The Holmes Partnership accomplished certain outcomes in teacher preparation, such as the proliferation of the professional development schools (PDS) concept, but it did not take strong positions on state and national policy. The lack of unified action in areas of state policy by leading institutions of higher education may have contributed to the stalling of reform (Fullan et al., 1998). The literature of practice in teacher education urges reform that includes collaboration across disciplines essential to educating teachers for increasingly diverse student populations (Blanton, Griffin, Winn, & Pugach, 1997; Darling-Hammond, 1996). Those disciplines may include special education, social work, general education, family and child development, counseling sociology, and educational leadership. Researchers have identified barriers to cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary collaboration in teacher education that are largely administrative or social in nature. Barriers may include lack of incentives in faculty reward structures, inordinate amounts of time in already burdened faculty schedules, absence of understanding of interdisciplinary program development by administrators, lack of institutional resources, unwillingness by administrators to engage in creative faculty assignments, differences in philosophy among faculty, special interests and protectionist issues held by faculty, rigid thinking, and lack of respect across departments (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997; Miller, in press; Miller & Stayon, 1998; Tom, 1997). The culture of higher education has traditionally maintained rigid conceptions about content and practices for preparing teachers (Darling-Hammond, 1997; Tom, 1997). A decade of rhetoric about reform and the proliferation of the PDS concept would suggest that reform in collaborative teacher education is underway (Holmes Group, 1995). Interpretation of the status of institutional reform, however, may depend on whether one reads institutional mission statements and other documents, or whether one talks with faculty. In this article, we discuss findings of a qualitative study undertaken to explore the culture of higher education as it fits with proposed reform in teacher education and further describe existing barriers and supports. Although reports from administrators and official institutional documents continue to describe trends toward reform in definitions of scholarship and reward systems for faculty (Glassick et al. …

Assessment of Complex Performances: Limitations of Key Measurement Assumptions

Why do we assign numerical ratings when assessing complex performances? And what is the meaning and usefulness of those ratings given the nature of these performances and the multiplicity of assessment purposes? These were the key questions we grappled with in developing an assessment system to be used for national certification of accomplished teachers. Along the way, our work became entangled with philosophical, political, technical, and practical problems that led us into relatively uncharted territories. We worked with definitions of accomplished teaching, for example, as a domain of assessment in a profession influenced by competing and often radically different ideologies. Our goal was the creation of an assessment procedure to support certification decisions, to change teaching practice, and to evaluate complex performances in professionally, technically, and administratively acceptable ways. In the process, we uncovered some of the tensions that exist between the various stakeholders involved and were provided with opportunities to examine the broader context of assessment and its instrumental nature. This work also led us to examine some key assumptions that are held in the field of measurement and their implications for the multiple assessment purposes that we had to consider. The system we were developing was to be used by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) for the Early Adolescence / English Language Arts (EA/ELA) certification of exemplary teachers. The assessment included two components: (1) a portfolio, for which teachers documented three different teaching activities over several months and (2) an assessment center, for which teachers participated in a number of tasks, including semistructured interviews, analyses of teaching, and essays on instructional issues. While the particulars of the assessment are not critical here and can be found elsewhere (Delandshere & Petrosky, 1993,1994), it is important to understand its complexity. For example, just one of the portfolio tasks—the Post-Reading Interpretive Discussion Exercise (PRIDE)— required teachers to conduct and videotape a 20-minute interpretive discussion of a literature selection, to write a 3to 10-page commentary analyzing the discussion and their understanding of interpretation, and to include the instructional artifacts used or referred to in the videotape or the commentary. Overall, the candidates' performances involved a range of evidence: (1) sets of responses to tasks that required extensive written commentaries, lengthy videotape segments of their teaching, and videotaped oral interviews with candidates; (2) documents that were produced by the candidates and their students and documents acquired from other sources (e.g., books, instructional materials); and (3) a process through which candidates could integrate and reflect on these different perspectives that resulted in another written document. The assumptions we worked from were mostly related to the technical aspects of assessment and the necessity for evidence of reliability and validity. These assumptions were based on our prior experience and grounded in the measurement tradition. For most of this century, educational achievement or the status of an individual's knowledge has been judged through measurement—that is, by the assigning of numbers to test responses. The resulting scores are used to make value judgments about the quality of performances. After working for several years to develop evaluation schemes, we considered an alternative to the practice'' of assigning numerical ratings, which was to formulate judgments based directly on the characteristics of the performance. Such an alternative may be unnecessary when there is a one-to-one correspondence between the assignment of points and the number of correct responses, but the complexity and breadth of responses for this assessment appeared to defy such correspondence. To further complicate the matter, the tasks developed for this assessment were grounded in a professional ideology that values knowledge as individually and socially constructed and as reflected in particular discourses and contexts. This conception of performance is quite different from those implied in many assessment contexts and seemed to require an evaluation scheme more consistent with this representation of knowledge than with the traditional numerical scoring schemes. To this end, our procedure for judging used what we called interpretive summaries of performance, written records that document the salient characteristics of the performance and the judges' interpretations of those as evi-

Teaching in Dangerous Times: Culturally Relevant Approaches to Teacher Assessment

New teacher assessment tools claim to provide more evaluation of teacher competency. However, some aspects of these new assessment tools may actually serve to reinscribe a narrow set of teaching practices that fail to serve all well-particularly of color and living in poverty. This article looks at some of the debate surrounding teacher assessment and raises questions about what is missing in so-called authentic assessments of teachers. INTRODUCTION In the popular book, Dangerous Minds (initially released as My Posse Don't Do Homework in 1992) former-Marine-turned-teacher LouAnne Johnson is credited with turning around the class from hell-a group of urban African American and Latino students on the road to failure in school and in life. This book (and subsequent motion picture) was just one more of what Strop (1996) identifies as among the teacher-as-savior genre of filmsmovies that construct an image of teachers, particularly White teachers, as rescuing urban students of color from themselves, families, and communities (Baker, 1996). Closer examination of these celluloid pedagogies reveals characters who, with missionary-like zeal, struggle to give otherwise hopeless students hope, raise these students' abysmally low levels of self-esteem, and steer them away from the path of wanton self-destruction. Unfortunately, most of the teachers in this film genre pay little or no attention to the academic achievement of students. Thus, while many audiences applaud the Hollywood teacher-images' amazing social work, interpersonal, and cross-cultural communication skills, few real-life educators and/or educational researchers would point to any of these histrionic teachers as exemplary classroom instructors. Nonetheless, what the actors teaching on the silver screen do with students Delpit 1995) dubs other people's children is seen as just fine-as long as no one in the real world tries to do the same things with the whom most of the nation's educators view as their own. Given the changing demographics of the student body in the United States and the bifurcation of public school student populations into groups of haves and have-nots, it is important to understand that, rather than confronting dangerous minds, teachers of urban students of color are teaching in dangerous times. One of the most urgent issues facing this perilous era and the cadre of teachers who serve in it is that of being able to more accurately measure what students know and are able to do. Much attention has been paid to new forms of student assessment that purportedly do just that (Newmann & Associates, 1996). However, communities of color, which historically have raised questions about the potential biases built into traditional test measures, have challenged the purpose and design of many of the new assessments (The College Board, 1985; Educational Testing Service, 1991). The scrutiny of student assessment has been accompanied by a focus in the educational community at large on teacher assessment (Darling-Hammond, 1988; Wise, DarlingHammond, & Berry, 1987). Within three years after the publication of the U.S. Commission on Excellence in Education's (1983) A Nation at Risk report, two national studies focusing on the need to improve the nation's teaching force emerged: the Holmes Group's (1986) Teachers for Tomorrow's Schools and the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession's (1986) A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. Among the suggestions offered by these bodies in the mid-1980s were: (a) higher standards for admission into the teaching profession, (b) elimination of the undergraduate degree in education, and (c) improved assessment measures for both preservice and inservice teachers. This era also saw the creation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC). …

National Standards in English: What Are They? Where Does NCTE Stand?

o. Teachers of English (NCTE) has been working aon various aspects of national in English. The topic is complex, the politics are often byzantine, and the fluid procesi s of development is not atways easy to track. As an NCTE staff member who has worked closely with some and always stayed within earsh ot of others, I've found it useful to group the according to the two that are likely to affect all middle school, junior high, and high school teachers and students most directly-(1) the National Council of Teachers of English/International Reading Association (NCTE/IRA) English Language Arts Standards Project and (2) the New Standards Project on assessment of student performance-followed by (3) the unique tail-wags-dog program for 12th-grade English called the Pacesetter Project; and (4) the opportunity ladder for excellent teachers developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). I'll give a brief overview here of the above projects. Several others-National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the NCTE/IRA joint statement on assessment, and other efforts like the English Coalition-are often considered as standards projects (see Myers 1994). What's lacking in thoroughness here will, I hope, be compensated by attention to key features of the and by candor about the politics thereof. Warning: The cup of information here is drawn from the river as it was flowing mid-summer 1994. The currents will no doubt be run-