Photo provided From left: McNinch Primary teachers Shawna Zervos and Nicole Majewski have earned National Board Certification in Early Childhood Literacy.

A partnership more than 10 years in the making between two Marshall County teachers eventually led to their national recognition.

McNinch Primary School first grade teacher Nicole Majewski began her career under the guidance of 25-year educator Shawna Zervos. They became friends and, in 2014, began the lengthy process to become certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

“I have admired Shawna since our first meeting,” said Majewski. “We just hit it off. We really motivate each other.”

In 2014, the organization began new certification standards. They allowed teachers to complete the required tasks over a a four-year period instead of just one.

Zervos and Majewski completed the process this year. Zervos was among the batch of the first Pre-K teachers in the state to be recognized with the NBPTS certification in Early Childhood Literacy.

Both teachers are now certified for life.

“National Board certification is referred to as the ‘gold standard’ for teachers,” said Zervos. “It requires, essentially, all the work of earning a doctorate, without the nice Ph.D. … Those of us who completed this program this year, we are the first preschool teachers in the state to be National Board certified.”

To become certified, teachers must complete an assessment, a portfolio, a filmed component and a student data assessment. They also must pass a written test.

“They provided us with six hours of graduate credit, a video camera, a mentor teacher and a collaborative group with 40 of us, for online meetings,” said Zervos. “There are lots of people I haven’t met in person, but we had to complete weekly Hangout times through Google. … Nicole and I both applied to do that. She pushed me to do it, I pushed her to do it, and we were both accepted.”

Prior to her employment with Marshall County Schools, Majewski spent a year under Zervos’ instruction. During that time, weekly and monthly meetings would supplement her experience. Zervos said that Majewski’s lessons just as often taught her new things in return.

“She was such a positive teacher and had so many attributes,” said Zervos. “The way she adjusted the curriculum to meet multiple needs was so amazing, it was sort of a role reversal. I was going there as a way of achieving new techniques and ideas for my own room, as much as I was going to support her.”

Zervos said she and Majewski were able to complete their certifications thanks in large part to support on the school and county level.

For her part, Majewski said the certification program taught her new ways to educate students. One method involves finding an interesting topic to the students — in a recent case, volcanoes — and finding reading material at a higher grade level. Students then annotate and break down information into manageable amounts, before bringing it back to their own level for comprehension.

This process, she said, increased the student’s comprehension of the material to a 100 percent level in the fields she was instructing.

“By the end of it all, all of my students have mastered the listening comprehension and were ready to move on to reading comprehension, instead of the one or two that were still at that level,” she said. “Those were students receiving intervention services. My students in the reading comprehension group had mastered comprehension of story elements in text.

So it all paid off,” said Majewski. “They learn(ed) the learning objective I set for them, and they were active in tracking their own progress over time.”