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Board Certification the Norm

At the National Board, we work with states, districts and teachers associations to make Board certification the norm—building a path from teacher preparation to networks of peer support to help teachers achieve certification.

Collaborative Professional Learning

National Board Certified Teachers across the country have advocated for ways to bring accomplished teaching—and by extension, improved student learning—to scale using National Board Certification as a foundation for job-embedded, relevant and engaging professional learning. These initiatives are impacting all aspects of the teaching continuum and growing the numbers of accomplished teachers.

Two models in particular have seen great success positively impacting student learning and school culture:

  • School-based professional learning that strengthens practice for all teachers
  • Putting beginning teachers on a path towards accomplished teaching

We’ve created a toolkit to help principals and superintendents learn from the work of Board-certified teachers across the country.

View the toolkit

I recommend that all states and districts gather their key education stakeholders together and collaborate. We built bridges and are in close alliance with bipartisan politicians. That is how we are achieving our goal of dramatic improvement so rapidly and effectively
Betsy Giles, NBCT, Clark County Education Association, NV.

Network to Transform Teaching (NT3)

At the National Board, we envision a future in which every student has the opportunity to learn from accomplished teachers every day. In 2013, we launched an effort to discover how to make this goal a reality: the Network to Transform Teaching, or NT3. By 2020, NT3 aims to increase the number of Board-certified teachers by 20,000.

NT3 is anchored in the National Board’s longstanding promise to the field to be by teachers, for teachers. Using the Networked Improvement Community model, NT3 relies on the wisdom of practitioners at the school, district and state levels to develop resources and strategies that will bring accomplished, Board-certified teaching to scale. By 2020, over 1,000 schools, 100 districts and 10 states will be participating in the network.

We are only half of a school year into this work, and we’re already seeing a dramatic shift in how teachers characterize the value and function of their collaborative teams. Achieving this change required an honest look at the existing system, to recognize how the system itself, and not the people within the system, produced both positive and negative results. Increasing the former and reducing the latter is the work of improvement, and I now feel like we have some core principles that will not only guide further improvement, but also help our efforts to endure.
Mark Gardner, NBCT, Camas School District, WA

To learn more about the Network to Transform Teaching or to contact the NT3 Director in your state, visit http://nt3.nbhq.org.

Access an overview of NT3 here.

Building Accomplished Teaching for Native American Students

Since 2015, the National Board has been working with the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) to achieve the goal of having 1,000 Board-certified teachers across the 183 BIE and tribally-operated schools in the United States. Since its inception, this project has engaged more than 450 affiliated teachers and seen a 25% increase in the number of National Board Certified Teachers.

Through this project, the National Board aims to:

BIE affiliated teachers are saying…

My students have benefited the most. Through this process I have become better at using formative assessment to drive instruction in order to help my students achieve learning targets.

I feel that all professional teachers should challenge themselves to develop their craft when given the opportunity. The BIE afforded this opportunity and I am grateful.