The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (National Board) has received top marks in its category for the U.S. Department of Education’s i3 (Investing in Innovation) Development grant competition. The $3 million grant is designed to advance student achievement in high-need schools in grades 3-6 mathematics and science through improved teacher preparation and early-career teaching support.
The project, Building a Pipeline of Teaching Excellence, capitalizes on the National Board’s repository of case studies of accomplished teaching, including videos of board-certified teachers paired with analyses describing instructional decision-making and teaching strategies. The cases will be housed in an online resource called Accomplished Teaching, Learning, and Schools (ATLAS). Through the i3 grant, the National Board and its partners will pilot ATLAS cases in six teacher preparation programs and seven local education agencies (LEAs). The project will help embed National Board standards and exemplars of accomplished teaching in pre-service and induction in participating institutions of higher education and LEAs.
The National Board will oversee this project, convening partners to develop new instructional approaches that are high-impact, cost-effective and scalable. Ultimately, ATLAS will expand across all 25 National Board certificate areas, including thousands of cases addressing all areas of the curriculum and every developmental level of pre-K-12 education.
The National Board and its partners will widely disseminate findings from this project through research and policy briefs, presentations to their memberships, research monographs, postings on websites and social media. The primary role of organizational partners will be to facilitate the dissemination of information and research gleaned from this initiative. Findings will be broadly disseminated to all of the nation’s schools, colleges and departments of education; state education agencies; and the National Board’s network of 100,000 accomplished teachers and policy partners.
