This blog post comes from Virginia Bartels. Virginia is a renewed NBCT who works with me with the National Board Program. Virginia was a high school English teacher so she is a great resource for hints and suggestions about writing National Board entries.
When working on your written commentaries for National Board, it might be helpful to be reminded of the steps of writing:
prewrite, draft, revise, edit, polish, publish.
1. Prewriting involves brainstorming, thinking, listing, and outlining. This preliminary stage consists of making choices.
2. Drafting includes taking notes, playing with ideas, expanding an outline, and organizing thoughts into paragraphs. The focus is getting something "down on paper" or "up on the computer screen." Do not concern yourself with perfection at this stage.
3. Revising might include getting peer feedback, reading your writing aloud, conferencing in pairs or small groups, meditating, paraphrasing, condensing, expanding, and altering what you have written. In this stage, you are concentrating on the content and its clarity, accuracy, and thoroughness.
4. Editing addresses diction (word choice), order, sentence structure, and examples given.
5. Polishing is primarily checking for the the last time the accuracy of mechanics, grammar, and spelling.
6. "Publishing" is the submission of your portfolio for those teachers who will read and score your work.
These six stages do not necessarily occur in this order. Some stages might be skipped or blended into one another. Sometimes the stages are not part of a one-time sequence but more of a cycle of repeated steps.
