Teaching for the Test

The author in his classroom at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. (Scott Gregory Robinson)

There are at least 25 certificates offered by the National Board, each with its own tailored benchmarks. My certificate area was early adolescence/English language arts; the 16 standards I had to meet ranged from "Knowledge of Students" to "Family Outreach," and I was required to show I met them, in part, through four portfolio entries. Each entry was designed to highlight an aspect of teaching. The first was "Analysis of Student Growth in Reading and Writing." It, like the other entries, was accompanied by a Byzantine set of instructions, but the bottom line was that I had to pick two students and show through their work how I had helped them learn during two assignments. Entries two and three asked me to tape lessons: once while conducting a full class discussion and another while the kids were working in small groups. For one, the media specialist filmed me when I was in the library helping students learn how to search science databases. For the other, my teaching partner ran the camera while our sophomores brainstormed ideas for a book project.

"Documented Accomplishments" was the title of the final entry. I had to show what I was doing above and beyond the classroom work, such as collaborating with colleagues and connecting with parents. To the National Board, this requirement was more than extra credit. I had to answer the same bottom-line question about my out-of-school work as I did about the taped lessons: How does this contribute to student achievement? I settled on three big accomplishments that I figured covered all the bases: my freelance writing about education; teaching courses for teachers as an adjunct faculty member at George Mason University; and the canoe project.

ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL IN THE FALL OF 2006, I looked out at the crop of newly minted 10th-graders crammed into their wooden desks.

"Do you think they're ready for the quiz, Ms. Bain?" I deadpanned.

"Sure," replied my partner, Jen Bain, a history teacher with whom I shared this class of 50 kids. The students' nervous smiles froze as we walked around the room, distributing quiz papers.

"What's 'Wood, Water & Stone?'" asked one boy, picking up his quiz.

That was when we explained that, in addition to covering the normal humanities curriculum of history and literature from 1500 to the present, we were going to build a dugout canoe. "Wood, Water & Stone" was the title of the project, in which we promised to give our students a boat's-eye view of history, technology and culture.

The room grew silent as the students started in on the questions: List three Native American tribes of Virginia. Who was Walter Plecker? If a tree falls in the forest (circa 1500 and felled by an Indian), how is it taken down?

No one did too well, of course, which was the point. In a school year marked by the regional observance of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, North America's "first" settlement, none of our students knew about the people who had lived here for centuries before the European colonists arrived. To be honest, their teachers didn't know much, either.

Together, we learned as we went. We discovered that there are eight recognized groups of Native Americans in Virginia, but the reason most of us only vaguely recognize tribe names such as Pamunkey or Mattaponi is that Walter Plecker, Virginia's state registrar from 1912 to the mid-1940s, had essentially wiped them from the census by vigorously applying to Native Americans the "one-drop rule" originally designed to deny voting rights to blacks. One drop of Indian blood, and you didn't exist.

To kick off the canoe project, we invited an expert in primitive technology, who strode through the halls clad in Davy Crockett buckskins. After he made fire in the school courtyard four different ways without a match, one student wrote in her canoe notebook, "Maybe Native American technology wasn't so primitive after all." Over the course of the school year, a scientist from a government lab would show how an analysis of a slab from our log revealed the weather patterns in Warrenton since 1891, and the students made a Web site to document the construction process and our classroom work. We also learned that fire and mud can be just as effective as an iron ax blade when working with wood.

The lessons were fun, but, knowing I was going to write about them for the National Board, I continually racked my brain for ways to go deeper. At the same time, I struggled to capture classroom lightning in a bottle, or at least on videotape. There were moments when I knew that trying to meet the board's standards pushed me to new heights as a teacher.