NTL Reflections 2025 Conor Cameron

Conor Cameron NBCT Renewal Story

My name is Conor Cameron. This is my 14th year teaching mathematics at Eric Solorio Academy HS on the Southwest side of Chicago. I am also Solorio’s union delegate. Six years ago, I chose to pursue National Board Certification (NBC) because research indicates that students of National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) who have, and use, their deep knowledge of their students, their content area and pedagogy in their teaching, learn more. And I definitely wanted that for myself and my students. I achieved Board Certification in Adolescent and Young Adult Mathematics. I then chose to “maintain” my certification, a renewal process NBCTs choose to do every 5 years in order to remain current, further reflect on and refine their teaching practice, and continue to grow professionally. I did so through Nurturing Teacher Leadership (NTL), the CTU’s NBC Professional Development support program.

In deciding whether or not to maintain my National Board Certification, I thought about the credibility the four extra letters, NBCT, in my signature, confer. In particular, the need to have NBCTs at Solorio is great. Our predominantly Hispanic students, 35% of whom are English Language Learners and 85% who receive free lunch, need teachers who have a deep understanding of content, deeply know their students and how they learn, and use that information to develop and implement instruction that engages students in grade-level thinking to advance their learning. I want to always be on top of my game, continue to be that teacher, and work with a team of these highly accomplished NBCTs. In the last five years, since I have become National Board Certified, and have used advanced practices aligned to the standards of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), my Algebra students, for example, have learned to use what they noticed about a sequence of objects to develop a strategy, and ultimately an Algebraic expression, to count those objects. Partaking in NTL and maintaining my Board-certification has enabled me to continue to find new ways to meet the challenge of helping students find success on grade-level mathematics for which they were previously unprepared. For example, before becoming Board-certified, my students were unable to perform multi-step unit conversion problems because I hadn’t given my students a way to visualize the goal in these exercises, but after becoming Board-certified, I was able to use my knowledge of mathematics and advanced teaching methodologies to reflect on why my students were struggling. I was then able to develop a way of teaching that skill using manipulatives that allowed my students to see what conversion factor needed to be in the numerator and denominator of each fraction to ensure that the simplified product had the required units. Because NBC gave me the tools to think more deeply about the source of the problem, and because I became adept at using them, my students went from being able to successfully perform multi-step unit conversion problems with 25% accuracy to being able to perform this skill with 75% accuracy. Indeed, one student even remarked, “being able to try it out with the cards [manipulatives] before writing anything helps me pick the right conversion to multiply by to get the right answer.”    

The process for maintaining my National Board Certification was rigorous and certainly different from merely renewing my teaching license. The support NTL provided me throughout the Maintenance of Certification (MOC) renewal process gave me a structured setting in which to re-acquaint myself with the NBPTS Mathematics standards, a detailed description of accomplished mathematics teaching. Unpacking the standards with my mentor and cohort again, five years after originally achieving NBC, enabled me to reflect on how I needed to adjust my practice to remain current, and pointed at maintaining the goal of what updated accomplished teaching looked like, based on current research of “best practice” in my field. Two standards I concentrated on, which were prominently featured in the MOC process, upgraded the “Professional Community” and “Reflection and Growth” portions of my practice. Guidance from my mentor to ensure I continued to master these standards prompted me to identify a need my 9th grade Algebra students had and then adjust my teaching practice to address this need. Informal data I had collected while teaching revealed that my “direct instruction” often caused my students to ask the same procedural, “what do I do first” and “what comes next” questions over and over again when trying to solve a problem. Verifying this observation by examining assessment data, I found that many students misapplied rules and procedures on tests and quizzes. I reflected on these data that suggested these students had a weak understanding of how to apply procedures when solving problems. They needed, but weren’t getting from me, an explanation of how to think about and make decisions when carrying out procedures while solving Algebra problems. I concluded that despite my efforts to present content in a coherent manner, many of my 9th grade Algebra students still saw math as a collection of unconnected procedures and rules. I was determined to improve my practice and address this student need (to better understand when to apply particular mathematical procedures and rules) that I hadn’t been meeting. And to do so, I leaned on my Professional Community for support. I addressed my students’ need through continued professional learning and collaboration with my peers, including several NBCTs from both my school and other schools throughout the district. With this Professional Learning Community, I learned about and then taught rich Algebra tasks, i.e., tasks that do not require significant background knowledge but enable students to solve them in a variety of different ways. Such tasks improved my students’ ability to properly apply procedures and rules because students get to see several approaches to solving a particular problem in quick succession, which helps them to compare methods and notice which steps are important in those methods. For example, previously, when I taught a problem that leads to an equation involving the distributive property and natural numbers, I might have only had one student present the “most efficient” method for solving such a problem. However, after my work with my Professional Learning Community, I had students present many different methods to solve such a problem, from guessing and checking, to distributing the coefficient, to dividing both sides of the equation by the coefficient. Upon seeing all of the methods I had selected for students to present, based on my professional learning during MOC, I facilitated discussions in which I asked students to explain how and why each method worked, how the ‘distribute’ and the ‘divide’ methods were similar, how they were different, and why they arrived at the same answer. In this instance, such a discussion helped my students make connections between the distributive property, inverse operations, and the order of steps needed to solve an equation. The opportunity to compare different methods helped students see that if they wanted to distribute first, they had to wait to combine like terms, whereas if they wanted to clear the coefficient of a parenthetical expression by dividing, they first had to isolate that expression. Without getting to see and discuss these methods side by side, my students would have remained confused about the order of the steps. Then, to bring in my professional community for further support, I modeled lessons to groups of teachers, of selecting and sequencing student work on problems that lend themselves to multiple solutions, and received feedback from these teachers. I reflected on their input and suggestions and revised my discussion facilitation strategies over time to improve my implementation of these rich Algebra tasks. This shift in my instruction provided me with a better way to teach rules and procedures. My practice now starts with student work and complements repeated practice by providing students with an opportunity to attend to, talk about, and make sense of the conditions under which it is appropriate to perform a particular procedure, follow a specific rule, or take a particular step.

This instructional shift also improved my students’ problem-solving abilities. For example, I used to launch my unit on systems of equations by asking students to graph two lines on the same coordinate grid and to find the point of intersection. After my NBC renewal work to include more rich, multiple-method Algebra tasks, I reflected on how I could improve my systems unit, and decided to launch with this problem: On a farm with pigs and chickens, the farmers counted 84 legs and 26 heads and wanted to know how many of each type of animal they had. Students solved this problem using a variety of different methods such as guessing and checking, drawing animal heads and distributing animal legs in pairs until running out, and writing and solving equations using substitution or elimination. After students had solved the problem, I facilitated a discussion centered on the students’ work in which I highlighted their use of pictures, tables, equations, and graphs. Here again, I asked students to explain how to use each method to answer the farmers’ question, but I also asked questions that helped students to notice how the information from the problem showed up in each method. After this discussion, students better understood not only how to use the information from the problem to get started with each method, but also how the methods were connected and why they resulted in the same answer. By having more options they could use to solve such problems; by understanding and being able to explain how to complete the calculations using different methods; and by understanding that they were free to make choices because a variety of different tools would produce the correct answer, my students improved their ability to begin and persist in solving systems of equation word problems. Previously, students often arbitrarily selected numbers from the problem and either added them all together or inserted them unthinkingly into equations which they then could not solve. Due to the instructional shift I made based on what I learned from my NTL community, I observed that my students were more willing to attempt difficult problems and were also then better able to correctly answer the question such problems posed.

For the first time ever, I am teaching four sections of 10th grade Geometry. Maintaining my National Board Certification was key to preparing me to teach this new course because it gave me the recipe: really know the content, deeply know the students, and fully develop the pedagogy. Maintaining my Board Certification reminded me of the value of working with a planning team, another professional community, to revise and implement the next iteration of this new Geometry course. Working together this first year, my geometry planning team colleagues and I have already identified that our students struggle to justify their reasoning. We have begun making changes to the course that give students more deliberate scaffolding in writing proofs. Maintaining my NBC, particularly my focus on the “reflection and growth” standard, pushed me to reflect on how providing partially completed proofs enabled students to find more success in providing mathematical justifications for the most critical statements in geometric proofs. Upon reflecting on this improvement, I, in collaboration with my planning team, have decided to include proofs in more units to enable students to continue to practice this important skill. Maintaining my NBC put me in the right mindset to be a continual professional learner, and to continue to hold students to high standards. In collaboration with my school planning team, I am already reflecting on changes I can make in future years of teaching this course to not only better respond to the needs of my students to justify their reasoning, but also on how I will measure the impact of my changes on their learning.

Having seen the positive impact maintaining National Board Certification has had on my own teaching and on my students and colleagues, I am pleased by CTU’s continued support of NTL. From CTU President Karen GJ Lewis, Emeritus, who signed every email with “NBCT” after her name, to the present day in which NTL has supported increasingly diverse cohorts of initial candidates, CTU should be proud of its work toward the goal of getting more NBCTs into classrooms, and teams of NBCTs into schools and content departments. CTU’s continued support of NBC improves outcomes for students across Chicago. My math students are “proof” of that.   ; )