SCET Journal 2020

Reflecting on

Teaching

though, I was not dissuaded. With incredible help and support from my colleagues and family, I managed to submit the four-component (and many subsection) portfolio before taking off to a new city and a Ph.D. program. Months later, my “Pass” was registered; I was an NBCT for another ten years. Reflection on First Renewal Like with my initial certification, I learned it really does take a village. The media center specialist helped me convert video from camcorders to a burned CD. A master eighth grade ELA teacher graciously loaned me her class to teach for a week. The science depart- ment helped me develop a workshop on differentiation I could use for one of my PGEs. A group of my col- leagues stayed after school and watched video clips with me, offering advice on what to utilize and ways to look at the footage that I had not previously con- sidered. And my family, once again, put up with way too many dinners of cereal or macaroni and cheese. I could not have done this alone. The second thing I learned coming out of this sec- ond encounter with the NB certification process was there is never a “good time” to do things. Conditions will never be ideal; things always happen in one’s life. Waiting for the “right” time to engage in such a process will mean waiting forever. Taking those incre- mental nibbles makes it possible to compartmentalize a larger task, making the pieces feasible and providing accumulating “small wins” regardless of whatever else may be occurring simultaneously. Second Renewal This past academic year, I received the requisite reminder letter that my certification was, in fact, expir- ing again. My first thought was, “Wow, twenty years! How is that even possible?” The toddler and the infant both now attend college, and I am technically an “empty nester.” I have lived in three different states and five different houses since my initial NB cycle, and my K-12 career somehow morphed into a higher education one by way of a Ph.D. degree. My photo- copied binder full of “THE BOX”’s materials seems archaic, and it is hard to believe I haven’t always had a cell phone on which to record and edit the video elements. This time around, the PPG components were the same, but I obtained everything I needed and submitted the final portfolio online via a verification

code. No more “THE BOX”; no more forests of paper; no more VHS cassettes or CD-ROMs; no more peeling and sticking hundreds of labels; no more misplaced submissions in a San Antonio warehouse. As a univer- sity instructor, I still had to borrow a classroom of AYA students -- this time it was an AP Language course in a local high school. The glitch this time was that for a different component, I needed to provide work from “pre-K-12 learners, professional colleagues, communi- ty members, or parents;” my university students – and primary learners at this stage in my career -- did not fall into any of these categories. Fortunately, NB quick- ly responded to my query, and my immediate panic subsided as they assured me any learners would qualify. Par for the course, I dealt with personal issues during this cycle, including surgery to repair my detached hamstring just two weeks prior to my portfolio’s due date (No guarantees that my written commentaries made any sense since I may have been impaired by pain medication at the time of writing!). But the lessons I had learned through the previous iterations held strong – be organized and strategic, take nibbles and small bites, rely on your village – and I was able to submit on time. Reflections on Second Renewal and Beyond One of the things I noticed this time was how easily I was able to write to the reflective prompts. In my initial certification, I struggled to contain my written commentaries to the required maximum page counts. For example, one entry had an 11-page maximum; my initial draft was 17 pages, and I had to undergo at least seven different revisions to finally get it to meet the criteria. Even so, I eliminated all paragraph inden- tions, flipped all prepositional phrases to possessives (i.e. “classes’ assignments” instead of “assignments for the class”), and eliminated every extraneous “that” in order to save space. By my second renewal, my first drafts were on-target and on-message. Two NB portfolios, a Ph.D. program, and a dissertation heavily impacted my ability to finally write succinctly with fo- cus. Reflective practice had also become so ingrained in my every day teaching, it took little for me to unpack it for the sake of analysis; I already knew exactly what I was doing and why; it was just a matter of putting it on the page (digital one, of course). Additionally, I have come to realize in the extraordi-

South Carolina English Teacher

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