Certification is a powerful and enriching professional learning experience
that says to the education community,
“I have been assessed through a rigorous national process
to achieve Certification status and I am an expert at what I do.”
I have compared Certification to running the New York Marathon.
There’s quite a few similarities between Certification and a marathon.
You start off and you think it’s going to be smooth sailing.
You come across some road bumps
and you come across some tough times within the journey,
but there’s some incredible moments along the way.
When you get to the end,
as I’ve said before, it’s very affirming
and well worthwhile.
I certainly have developed as a professional,
a teacher and a leader.
“First of all, our intention today is
to develop our understanding
of how globalisation impacts
various aspects of our culture.”
I spoke to my principal
as soon as I was considering
going for Lead Certification,
and once I was sure that I had his support,
it made it easy for me to make the decision
to then apply for certification.
He said to me,
“I’m thinking about certification for Lead Teacher.”
I said, “Fantastic. Let’s do it.
Let’s go and find out how we do it.”
To decide on the Lead career stage,
I needed to spend some time really unpacking
the standards and the descriptors.
Once I decided on the
evidence that I was going to collect,
I made sure that the referees
were familiar with each aspect
and each piece of evidence,
so when I was talking to them
I was able to articulate, so when I was talking to them
I was able to articulate,
“This is the evidence I’m going to be using,”
and they were able to link
in their reference statements
with the evidence that I’d collected.
In regards to writing the annotations to my evidence,
what I tried to do was
first of all keep the reader in mind.
Secondly, I tried to make sure that
my annotations used the language
of the descriptors and that
they always showed my impact.
An example of the type of evidence
that I used to demonstrate the impact on students
was a story that I followed with
a student called Eliza.
Eliza, I taught in Year Nine for Society and Environment.
As part of a task,
Eliza had been part of a team that
developed an environmental project at the school.
I study currently a double degree of
Environmental Science and International Aid and Development,
and I do this online whilst
travelling to Third World countries
who are most affected by climate change.
Previous to going into Mr. Wadewitz’s class in Year Nine,
I had no idea what I was going to do.
Since doing the Rich Fast Project with Mr. Wadewitz,
I really got a passion for environmental issues,
so since doing that project
it’s now shaped the whole rest of my life, basically.
It was a great experience for me to see that
something I’d done in Year Nine with a student
had impacted them for their life,
which was overwhelming, really, and I didn’t expect that.
My referee position was that I really needed
to know Matt and his teaching,
and I needed to know how his students were going,
so I used some perception data
from his classes.
I also had many conversations with Matt,
and then of course I confirmed that
by attending his classroom,
speaking with students and seeing him in the classroom.
At the same time, I also observed him
working with other teachers
in the process of being a Lead Teacher.
So for me, it is
be completely involved and engaged with that person
in terms of that journey through the certification process.
My role as a referee for Matt was
to provide a bit of a conduit between
what was actually happening in the classroom
with Matt in his teaching,
and aligning that with the
Australian Professional Standard for Teachers.
“Do you remember also yesterday, guys,
we started to talk about text messaging,
and we started to talk about Facebook,
and we started to talk about the way we communicate?
Remember we said yesterday
- someone brought up the example about Tweeting.”
My role in organising a site visit
was to make sure that the assessor,
my referees and everyone involved on the day
knew exactly where to be and when to be there,
and the types of questions that would be asked.
From there I needed to make sure that
my lesson was well prepared,
and I was really keen
for my lesson to be a true representation of
the type of work I’d been doing.
In terms of advice
to an applicant who is preparing for Stage Two,
I would say
have clear communication
and open communication with your assessor,
and then I would say
speak with your colleagues and your referees
to make sure that they were comfortable
with what they’ll be asked.
Certification has allowed me to,
I guess, challenge myself,
and also have a deeper understanding of what it is to be
excellent
in terms of a classroom teacher and a leader.