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Dear Educator:
We are writing to ask you to consider becoming a candidate for National Board Certification, a very important component of the teacher quality agenda in our state and country.
As you are aware, we now have a three-stage career approach to licensing: (1) the Initial Educator License, (2) the Professional Educator License, and (3) the Master Educator License. One of the ways to obtain the Master Educator License is to become a National Board Certified Teacher, which you can pursue after three years of teaching. You have the opportunity to engage in a powerful professional development experience, becoming licensed for ten years as a Wisconsin Master Educator and increasing your annual income early in your career. Wisconsin has 266 National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs), nearly all of whom are WEAC members. Nationally, there are 40,206 NBCTs, so you can see that our potential for growth is enormous.
The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that operates a national, voluntary system to assess and certify teachers who meet high and rigorous standards of accomplished teaching. Teachers who achieve National Board Certification have demonstrated the ability, in a variety of settings, to make sound professional judgments about the best interests of students and to act effectively on those judgments.
The certification process is a two-part assessment. The first part asks a teacher to show evidence of good teaching practice by preparing a portfolio containing videotapes of classroom teaching, lesson plans, samples of student work, and written analyses and reflections on one's teaching. In the second component, candidates spend one-half day at an assessment center, completing six content-focused questions.
Consider the benefits of the NBPTS process:
You can visit www.nbpts.org to learn more about the process and your particular certificate area. To learn more about the Department of Public Instruction’s role in the process, visit http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlsis/tel/nb.html or e-mail Ann Kellogg at Ann.Kellogg@dpi.state.wi.us. To learn more about WEAC’s program to support NBPTS candidates, visit http://www.weac.org/Resource/NBPTS.htm or e-mail Ron Jetty at jettyr@weac.org.
National Board Certification is a process teachers helped construct, and it leads us down the high road toward educational excellence. Please consider pursuing the process and thank you for all you do for Wisconsin’s PK-12 students.
Sincerely,
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Stan Johnson |
Elizabeth Burmaster State Superintendent |
Posted August 22, 2005