In quickly growing Madison County, with the number of students increasing, officials want to make sure to not just increase the number of teachers, but make sure they have the best qualified in the classroom.
The Huntsville Committee of 100 and The Schools Foundation are nearing the halfway point in their goal of having 500 National Board Certified Teachers in Madison County’s three school districts.
The Schools Foundation Executive Director Stephanie Kelley said there are 218 NBCTs in Huntsville City, Madison City and Madison County schools combined.
“We have nearly 50 teachers awaiting final confirmation that they are certified,” Kelley said at the National Board Certified Teacher Breakfast at the Jackson Center last week. “This means the teachers have completed all of their modules.”
Kelley said an additional 150 teachers are “in the pipeline” working toward certification. Kelley said the number of NBCTs has increased by 40% since the Committee of 100 and The Schools Foundation initially began a campaign to raise scholarship funds for 100 certified teachers in 2020.
They upped the goal to 500 with their Raise Your Hand campaign through the Committee of 100′s philanthropic arm, the Creative Cities Fund. The Committee of 100 is made up of businessmen and women in the Huntsville metro.
The Raise Your Hand campaign provides a $2,000 scholarship per teacher going through the certification process. The campaign has raised more than $700,000 so far.
“We’ve made tremendous gains toward that goal,” said Kris McBride, Creative Cities Fund chair.
McBride said the campaign’s goal is to have the highest concentration of NBCTs in the country among comparable communities. The number of certified teachers would make up 27% of all teachers in the county if the goal is reached.
“The research is clear,” McBride said. “Students of NBCTs reflect deeper learning compared to students of non-NBCTs. Students of NBCTs gain one to two months of additional learning per year.”
She said certification is correlated with achievement in math and reading in both elementary and middle school levels.
“And attrition of NBCTs is three times lower than average,” McBride said.
Achieving certification is not easy, Kelley added.
“A teacher must have at least three years teaching experience in the classroom,” she said. “The process involves gathering all of your evidence in your teaching, reflecting on your professional decisions and completing four assessment components from start to finish. It’s a process that takes teachers one to three years.”
Amanda Lemons, who works in Madison County Schools’ central office, said the process can be “a little intimidating and very intense.”
“But it is very attainable, especially with support,” she said. “You’ve seen the evidence today about how it impacts student learning. It really is the most powerful professional development experience you can invest in.”
Lemons said she saw a difference in her students’ test scores when she was teaching.
“It made a huge difference,” Lemons said. “It helped me focus on the things that are most important.”
“I feel like if we’re trying to get our students to improve their achievement, we need to improve ourselves,” added Hazel Green science teacher Dawn Cole. “I view this as my chance to improve my practice in the classroom, so I can be much (more) benefit to the students.”
She said the entire process requires a lot of reflection.
“By doing this process, I spread it out over a few years,” Cole said. “It required a little reflection of what I did in the classroom, how I did things.”
Meridianville Middle School eighth grade math teacher Wendie Hammond said the process “helped me get to know my students better because the process has you do a deep dive on how to get to know your students and the process of how to reflect on that teaching and how to improve.”
“I got to get to know them on a different level, working with the videos, the components, how to differentiate in my classroom and make it more toward their own needs in the classroom,” she said.
Hammond said it improved her students’ learning.
“It let me see how to better communicate with them and how to have them reflect on their own learning,” Hammond said. “They were able to evaluate themselves in their learning.”
McBride said Madison County Schools ranked in the top 25 nationally for total number of new NBCTs. In Alabama, both Madison County and Madison City are also in the top five among 139 school systems, she said.
McBride said both Huntsville City and Madison County are in the top five statewide with teachers in the pipeline. “Combined, Madison County would be in the top five nationally,” she said.
All national board certified teachers who are currently teaching in a classroom earn a $5,000 state-funded stipend, and beginning in 2018, those who teach certain subjects in hard-to-staff schools earn an additional state-funded $5,000 every year.
Source: Decatur Daily
