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This article describes a construct validation study of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards’ system of advanced certification. The evidence analyzed in the study included teachers’ instructional objectives and lesson plans for a given instructional unit, data collected during visits to all 65 teachers’ classrooms, and transcripts of scripted interviews of the teachers and their students. Two validity questions were examined in this comparative study: (a) To what extent is the National Board's vision of accomplished practice, as laid down in its Standards documents and as instantiated in its assessments, consonant with the characteristics of teaching expertise that have emerged from the research and scholarly literature?, and (b) Can National Board Certified teachers (NBCTs) and their noncertified counterparts (non-NBCTs) be distinguished on the basis of the quality of work produced by their students? In every comparison between NBCTs and non-NBCTs on the dimensions of teaching excellence, NBCTs obtained higher mean scores. In 11 of the 13 comparisons, the differences were highly statistically significant.

This chapter, originally written for a 1999 conference in Australia, considers the potential of National Board Certification to be a key lever in redesigning and differentiating the career structure for teachers in the U.S. It discusses the advantages of having a strong and well-regarded assessment system to identify prospective teacher leaders and increase the instructional capacity of schools. The author suggests what various parties must do in order for Board certification to achieve its potential. The National Board must increase the numbers and distribution of National Board certified teachers (NBCTs), keep access open for non-traditional candidates, and maintain high standards in assessment and re-certification. At the same time, states and local school districts must develop new roles and responsibilities for NBCTs, maintain or create new incentives for candidates, ensure that the credential is portable across state and local boundaries, and see that NBCTs are encouraged to work in districts and schools that need them most. Meanwhile, NBCTs, themselves, must take the initiative to create and respond to new opportunities for professional growth and responsibility, drawing upon the Board's strong and growing network of accomplished teachers. The chapter closes with three alternative scenarios, suggesting how the future of U.S. public schools depends on making thoughtful decisions about Board certification today.

National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) are highly accomplished teachers who have learned to deprivatize their teaching practice, and hence provide a valuable model for teacher leadership. This chapter, which focuses on NBCTs as mentors of teacher candidates in a professional development school (PDS) setting, blends the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards’ Five Core Propositions, Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium Standards, and National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education PDS Standards to operationalize teacher leadership among four NBCTs. Utilizing multiple case-study research methods, data were gathered using prereflections, weekly e-mail prompts, and end-of-semester interviews. Six common threads focus on NBCTs serving as bridges from preservice to in-service teaching and creating distributed leadership opportunities.

Now nearly two decades into its existence, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) serves as an indispensable reform in American education, not only on its own merits but also in relation to other reform trends, including both standards-based, accountability-oriented developments, and the unfolding of new parental choice and privatization movements. The NBPTS is a major strategy for recognizing and developing outstanding teachers, who are needed in all schools, whether organized around standards and assessments or mobilized via competitive market pressures. Drawing on an analogy with the medical field's National Board for Medical Examiners, this paper discusses the prospects for the NBPTS in the context of American educational reform, making the argument for its centrality, while also discussing the challenges that lie ahead for the Board.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of teacher incentive pay programs used by midsize to large school districts in Missouri.

This study primarily used the Teacher Compensation Programs (TCP) survey data. The TCP survey was developed by the authors to understand the nature and characteristics of financial incentives that Missouri districts used to recruit, reward, and retain quality teachers.

The data showed that, during the 2009-2010 academic year, 32 percent of the districts offered at least one financial incentive to recruit or retain teachers. Districts were more likely to reward teachers for obtaining National Board certification and for assuming extra duties than for teaching in the subject areas of shortage or in hard-to-staff schools. Larger districts with higher teacher salary were more likely than small districts to offer a larger number of incentive pay programs.

The findings of this study advance our knowledge of local incentive pay policies. It also contributes to the global discourse of teacher compensation and incentives and can be informative to policymakers in the USA and around the world when designing and implementing incentive pay programs to teachers. Further, it sheds light on the important policy question of whether disadvantaged local educational agencies are more likely to use incentive pay programs to recruit and retain teachers and promote an equitable distribution of the teacher workforce. This informs the decision making of providing targeted support to those in need.

“Certification”, in the context of this book, is an endorsement by a professional body that a member of that profession has attained a specified set of advanced performance standards. Application for NBPTS advanced certification is usually voluntary and available to all members of the profession (who have had to have at least three years experience in the profession). It is based on assessment of performance; it is not an academic qualification, or a record of professional development courses attended. It is portable – it belongs to the person (it is not a job or position or classification specific to a school or employer). A professional certification system is not in itself a performance pay scheme, but it does aim to provide a service to the profession, to the public and to employing authorities seeking a credible basis on which to provide incentives for professional development and recognition to teachers who reach high standards. Most important, it acknowledges that the individual who gains this certification is demonstrably teaching at the highest levels in our profession.

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the challenges of introducing a nationally consistent and credible system for recognizing and rewarding accomplished teachers − a standard-based professional learning and certification system. Such systems aim to provide attractive incentives for professional learning for all teachers, in contrast with competitive merit pay or one-off bonus pay schemes.Methodology – The chapter provides a case study of one country’s progress in reforming teacher career structures and pay systems, and it also draws on the experience of other countries that have been pursuing similar policies, such as Chile, England, Scotland, and the United States. Using document analysis and interviews with key stakeholders, the chapter describes progress in Australia’s latest attempt to introduce a system for the certification of teachers, this time at two levels – the Highly Accomplished Teacher and Lead Teacher levels.Findings – Despite strong support in principle by the main stakeholders, implementation is proving difficult in changing political and economic contexts. Reasons for these difficulties are compared with problems in other countries as they seek to implement advanced certification schemes.Practical implications – The Australian case indicates the importance of ensuring that agencies established to provide professional certification have the independence, stability, and professional ownership they need to carry out their function effectively.Social implications – Recent Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports highlight the relationship between the degree to which the work of teaching has been professionalized and student performance. An independent professional certification system is a concrete and relevant way for countries to “professionalize” teaching and treat their teachers as trusted professional partners; however, the Australian case indicates some of the challenges involved in making this a reality.Value – The chapter is the first to compare professional certification schemes in different countries and analyze factors affecting their success.

Docucases, a video curriculum for teacher education, combine carefully crafted documentaries of National Board Certified Teachers with the familiar structure of case teaching in order to make abstract concepts more concrete. In this chapter, we discuss the development of docucases, describe how they are currently being used in teacher education, and share evaluation data, which suggest that docucases increase teacher education students’ comprehension of INTASC standards and contribute to their enculturation into the world of quality teaching. We conclude with a discussion of how docucases help students create visions of themselves as teachers.

This chapter details the standard-setting methods used in the development of the NBPTS assessments. The dominant Profile Judgment Method was originally applied only to the NBPTSs Early Adolescence/English Language Arts assessment (EA/ELA). Although extremely flexible, it proved to be too complex, and increased the likelihood of false-negative errors in candidate classification. The Direct Judgment Method was found to be combatively economical; however, it was the Judgmental Policy Capturing (JPC) approach that was used since its approach was more akin to the everyday judgments we all make. The two-stage process of the JPC method will be describe in detail, using the standard-setting process used with the Early Adolescent through Young Adult/Art (EAYA/A) Assessments as an example.

This chapter aims to present a methodology to address the construct validity of the NBPTS standards, exercises, and decisions to identify accomplished teachers, by asking whether National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) teach differently in their classrooms such that they have a greater positive and worthwhile impact on their students. The critical attributes of expert teachers are identified via a synthesis of meta-analyses and a more traditional review of the literature on expert teachers. These attributes of expert teachers then form the basis of the study to identify the characteristics that discriminate between NBCTs and non-NBCTs.