ATLAS: Written Commentary

Descriptive, Analytical, and Reflective Writing


The certificate-specific Portfolio Instructions and Scoring Rubric for each component requires you to describe, analyze, and reflect on your teaching practice. This process involves these practices:  

  • describing what happened in an instructional situation  

  • analyzing the “how,” “why,” or “in what way” a particular lesson was or was not successful in teaching students  

  • reflecting on how you would handle this same situation in the future. 

For more information on the differences between descriptive, analytical, and reflective writing, please read the General Portfolio Instructions for National Board Certification (Pages 19 -30).

Activity: Identifying descriptive, analytical, and reflective writing in an ATLAS case

Read and select the commentary text you want to label

Click the comment icon

Enter your label (descriptive, analytical, or reflective) and write a sentence on why you chose that label for that text.


Select the Publish button. Note: Only you will see what you wrote. It will appear as a speech bubble in the right margin. 

Note: You may use ATLAS video cases while working towards your National Board certification, however, all ATLAS cases are drawn from National Board certification entries submitted prior to 2014 and are not examples of entries from the current certification assessment. National Board’s assessment was revised in 2014 and current entries have new structure, requirements and instructions (you can find information on the current process in the Candidate Center). These cases can, however, help you in your candidate journey because they are good examples of an unedited video, the teacher’s written commentary about the lesson, and related instructional materials.

National Board Candidate Center