Component 4 includes 3 parts: Knowledge of Students and Assessment, the Professional Learning Need and the Student Need.  Unfortunately there is no way around it, Component 4 is a beast.  It is the component with the most to keep track of and documents to submit, which makes organization key.  Below are my recommendations for Component 4, however you should always check the National Board’s website for official instructions. I did Component 4 last and it was the only component I completed that year.  At that point, I had learned from working on the previous components, so I hit the ground running.  My colleague and I got together over the summer…

It might just have been because this was my first component, however Component 3 was by far my most stressful.  I set goals of when I wanted my videos done that I just never seemed to meet, whether it was because the videotaping equipment didn’t work well, my lesson didn’t go as planned or because my students had way too much fun being taped.  In the end, I finished my videos well into the spring and my written commentaries with about a week to spare. In each of my videos I had portions where I was leading large group instruction and portions where students worked in small groups or pairs. …

In my opinion Component 2 was the least time consuming of the components and the most straight forward.  Which is why may teachers recommend doing Component 2 in the same year at Component 3. Personally, I did Component 2 in the same year as Component 1, for more on that, refer back to my previous post.   Component 2 centers around differentiation for 2 students.  I chose to show how I progressed two of my Spanish 1 students’ reading skills through authentic texts.  I selected a formative assessment as my first assessment and the chapter’s summative assessment for my second one.  My goal was to show that each of my students…

Preparing for the Component 1 assessment can be a daunting task.  It includes 45 selected response questions and 3 constructed responses, all designed to test your knowledge of language acquisition, the Spanish language, phonetics, learning styles, the 5C’s, ACTFL proficiency levels and the list goes on.  Here is my best advice before beginning to prepare: Take a breath. When viewed as a whole it is overwhelming, however I found that when I sat down and broke the test up into specific sections and topics, it became more manageable.  Overall my Component 1 score was my highest and this is what worked for me, keep in mind you should always refer…

Yesterday was an exciting one in my house, because this arrived in the mail:  I’ve known since December that I had received my National Board Certification in Spanish, but somehow the arrival of my certificate made it all seem real. When I began working on my certification in the fall of 2016 I didn’t really understand what I was getting in myself into.  I had decided over that summer that I wanted to pursue my National Board Certification, but beyond that I did not have a plan.  I had also begun taking classes for my Master’s Degree in Spanish in the spring of 2016 and my logic was “Well, if…