Tips for Achieving National Board Certification

In December, I saw fireworks. I successfully completed the National Board Certification four-part process during the 2023–24 school year. While applicants must finish the entire process in five years, I chose to get it all done in one year.

The National Board process has a total of four components: Three are portfolios of the applicant’s work, and one component is an exam. The portfolio components are due in May, and the exam can be taken through June. All scores are posted sometime in December. As soon as an applicant logs into their National Board account in December after completing all four components, they’ll know immediately if they’re certified when they see the fireworks on their screen. I logged in, held my breath, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the bright, sparkling colors bursting in dazzling streaks in front of my eyes.

Achieving National Board Certification is a major feat, and completing it all in one year is a large undertaking. I attribute much of my success to how I tackled this monumental task. Here I share tips on how others, too, can do this.

Plan of Action

First, read the list of eligibility requirements for applying on the National Board site. Once you select your certificate (the category for board certification), either the school year before your first attempt or the summer before, print out all of the informational PDFs from the National Board website for the components you will complete. 

Organize them in one of two ways: I put them all in one large binder with labeled dividers; other teachers I know put each component into a separate binder.

I liked having everything together because some of the printouts applied to more than one component, and sometimes while working on one, I would go back to my work on a different component for inspiration. I carried this binder with me all around school. Sometimes, I would find five or 10 minutes while waiting for a meeting to start where I could pull the binder out and reread the standards or think about a lesson.

Be sure to throw a pack of sticky notes in the front pocket of your binder(s). If I had a light bulb moment during the school day, I could grab a sticky note, write it down, and put it in my binder to flesh out later. You can even use different colors for each component.

Next, you need to read the printouts. This is a lot of reading, and you may need to reread sections. It’s an important foundational piece of the process, and you want to start it early so you don’t rush through it. Study the standards. Other teachers told me to memorize them; I didn’t, but I became very familiar with the standards. You’ll want to use their language in your answers. 

Annotate your reading. Highlight key details and underline important words and educational lingo. Use sticky notes in each component to note which of your class lessons you might include. Then you can move the sticky notes around and arrange them in order of strongest to weakest ideas, moving them to different components as you decide where you’ll use them. Write notes to yourself and any questions you have in the columns.

Reach out. Join a group. See if there’s a local group for teachers working on the certification process that you can join. There are great Facebook groups of people who are also working on certification, as well as those who have already achieved it. Find someone in your district who is also working on the process and someone who already certified. They can be a wealth of advice and support. Attend workshops hosted online by the National Board.

Map out your year on a calendar. What lessons and/or units will you use? When do they happen? Mark them, even roughly, on the calendar. I found that one of my components could have the student work done in December. Note on your calendar when you plan to write up your materials. For this component, I decided to focus on writing it up in January. Make a due date for yourself that’s earlier than the due date for the National Board. With all components due in May, having one mostly done by the end of January gave me time to focus on another component in February and March.

Give yourself some time to work on drafts. As an English teacher, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of revising your writing. I did so many drafts, and each one had more precise language. Don’t expect your writing to be as exact as it needs to be on your first draft.

With my early drafts, I would type all of the questions from the component into my document, ensuring that I answered each question and didn’t skip any by accident. I kept them in until late in the process. I removed the questions before submitting the document but kept them nearby for these final drafts to make sure that nothing I needed got cut. 

Assign a color to each standard, and highlight each part of your answer with the corresponding color of a standard you are addressing with that answer. This lets you see where you are lacking so you can work on boosting those areas. Remove the colors before you submit. Make sure you’re using the language that the National Board uses. Go back to where you underlined certain words and lingo.  

There are a lot of details to keep straight, so allow enough time at the end to make sure those details are taken care of. All of my drafts were finished by the end of April. I used the last two weeks to ensure that everything was formatted, done, and uploaded correctly.

For the video component, practice videotaping yourself and your class a lot. I needed to provide two videos, and I recorded my class probably 10 times. Make sure the sound and lighting are good. You’d be surprised how the lighting coming in from the windows can affect the video, depending on how you set up the camera. There can be some weird shadows sometimes that you may not notice until you record your class.

You want to be able to hear yourself and your students well. If you can, get someone else to videotape you. I used a tripod and didn’t have someone to help. It worked, but it would have been way easier if I had someone else in charge of the video while I just focused on teaching. Give yourself options. Need two videos? Make four and pick the best. I used a video from a lesson that was not my original top choice, but it came out way better than I expected. Be ready to catch magic when it happens.

My last piece of advice is to take a deep breath, get into a superhero pose, and tell yourself that you’ve got this! As the saying goes, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The process can look overwhelming, but it is totally doable. Break it down into smaller pieces, and take them one at a time. You can do this!