Building the Best Educational Staff: The Interview

Building the Best Educational Staff:The Interview
by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader

Developing an Effective Interview Process

Academic success has been directly linked to the quality of a school’s teaching and administrative staffs. Prescriptions are continually being proposed to improve educational personnel. These plans have included merit pay, improved evaluations, and easier termination policies among others. But this goal is too complex to be accomplished with singular solutions. What is required is a multi-faceted program that will address a variety of shortcomings in the current hiring system. Previously, I have compiled eight fundamental areas that need to be reassessed in order for districts to be able to hire, improve and retain the most talented educators.

This is the third in a series of articles that will detail the steps needed to implement those improvements. This post will focus on the interviewing process.

Rule 1: The interview begins with the resume

One of the most important components to the interview process begins before any face-to-face meetings occur. Choosing the best interview candidates from among dozens of resumes can be difficult. No single piece of paper can tell the complete story of an applicant’s strengths or weaknesses. But there are some items that deserve extra attention.

What is the candidate’s academic background and teaching experience?

Only applicants with a strong academic background in the subject area should be given serious consideration. While a major in the field would be preferable, the minimum requirement would be a significant number of successfully completed courses in the curriculum. In many states the requirements for certification are unrealistically low. For that reason there should be a thorough examination of the candidate’s GPA particularly in the subject area. If this information is not contained on the resume, a transcript should be requested. This extra step can reveal a great deal about a prospective teacher. For example, one individual who applied for a Chemistry position at my former school had a reasonably good overall GPA. However, a detailed look at the candidate’s transcript revealed that every course in Chemistry was “C” or lower including a few that had to be repeated. This information is not trivial.

Previous employment, summer jobs, and areas of interest should also be carefully examined. Matching an educator to a school is a subtle process. Different student bodies require different strengths. Evaluate prior experiences in terms of preparing the candidate for the school’s particular needs. After determining the top choices the interviewing process should begin.

Rule 2: Have the right people doing the interview

Teacher interviews should be conducted by the two individuals most directly involved in the development of new staff—the department chair and the supervising assistant principal. If one of the two does not attend an interview no hiring should take place until both have had an opportunity to talk with the candidate. Offering a position should require a 2-0 “vote”.

The inclusion of the chair is particularly important. No one understands the exact needs of a department as well as a person who works with this group every day. In addition having a teacher in the process gives the applicant an opportunity to ask specific questions concerning working at that particular school. While an AP has first-hand knowledge of the learning environment, it is not the equivalent to that of a full-time teacher. Moreover, if the department chairs have a voice in the hiring, they will also have ownership and accountability. It is now incumbent on them to make this hire work. And finally having both the AP and department chair conducting the interviews makes the process more consistent, allows them to develop a coordinated working relationship and gives this somewhat subjective decision making process more objectivity.

Rule 3: Everyone should be asking questions

An effective interview is one that allows information to flow in two directions. As the interviewers assess the qualifications of a candidate through a series of questions, the applicant should be seeking information about the makeup of the student body, an overview of the department personnel and educational philosophy and administrative support and expectations. This understanding of the educational environment within the building is critical. Hiring the right teacher is not always about hiring the most talented one. Good teachers and successful schools are not automatically a perfect fit. I have known many underperforming teachers who have found great success after transferring to a new location. People often underestimate the importance of personal chemistry in teaching success.

Rule 4: Ask questions that result in meaningful answers

The inquiries posed during an interview should elicit introspection of one’s beliefs about education. The goal should be to determine the applicant’s beliefs regarding why some students fail to achieve, how to reach different learning styles within a classroom, the most productive student/teacher relationship, and classroom management approaches. Some of my personal favorites include:

•Within your curriculum what is your favorite topic? How would you share that enthusiasm with your students?
•Next October when I visit your class, what facet of the lesson I observe will be the most impressive?
•During that visit what will be the most notable aspect of the classroom environment?
•What teaching issues would most likely require you to ask for advice from your colleagues?
A series of such questions should be created that will give true insights into the philosophies and beliefs of the candidate and also express the academic direction of the school.

Rule 5: The questions are only the beginning

The give and take of the interview should be only a portion of the process in determining who is offered a position. A comprehensive interview would include the following:

•Writing sample. The most basic skill required of a successful educator is the ability to communicate. This talent must exist both verbally and in writing. Having applicants express their views in words can reveal additional information not necessarily apparent in a question and answer setting. Sample questions could include “What motivates you to be an educator?”, “What was the primary reason you applied to this particular school?” “Think of your favorite teacher. What made this person so special to you?” A written answer to any of these inquiries could give some extremely important insights.
•Teach a lesson. Tell the applicant in advance that they will be asked to teach a fifteen minute portion of a lesson they have done in the past. They should be prepared with handouts, power points, board work, etc. If they are uncomfortable with this request, what does that say about their future in front of a classroom of students?
•Tour the school and visit classrooms. Remember this is a two-way interview. Give them a genuine feel for the educational environment. An interviewer can gather insights about a candidate by observing their reaction to a classroom visit. After one of my interviews a teacher asked me when the students would be dismissed. She then situated herself in the main office and watched the students as they left the building. She later told me that the manner in which they conducted themselves and their interaction with adults convinced her that she wanted to be at this school.
•Make a lunch date. Prior to offering a position, a highly-rated candidate should be invited to have lunch with the department during a school day. This setting provides a wonderful opportunity for interaction with potential future colleagues and often served as the final stage in the entire process.
Rule 6: Aggressively contact references and previous employers

Some of the worst information acquired during the interviewing process is obtained from references. Too many people are loath to give honest appraisals or worse they want to get rid of a problem teacher. Consequently interviewers need to ask pointed questions when contacting these individuals. The importance of their input needs to be clearly stated and emphasis be given to the need for candor. Books could be written about the harm caused by misleading references. Consequently, it is a process that must be undertaken carefully and with caution.

Rule 7: Use your new hires as a resource

Your new hires can help in improving the interviewing process. I always asked them why they chose to accept our offer and how our process compared to others. These conversations revealed some important insights that were used to strengthen our work in the future.

Pour un discours réussi à la Grads!!!

Commencement addresses: 6 steps for making the grade

By Guest Blogger on May 12, 2011 | Comments (0)

This post is by Richard McKeown, an executive communications coach, conference speaker and workshop leader specializing in presentation training, media training, crisis-communications strategy and leadership development.
It’s another day at the office, and you’re going through the mail. You begin reading a letter from the high school, community college or university you attended back in the day. “On behalf of the board of directors, it is my honor as its president to extend an invitation for you to serve as commencement speaker for our graduating class of 2011.”
The invitation usually gets one of two responses: “Wow, what an honor!” or “Why would they want me?” Whatever the response, another question enters your mind: “What in the world am I going to say?”
Here are some guidelines to make your comments relevant and memorable.

• Keep your remarks brief. Who hasn’t endured a graduation speech and thought, “I wonder when this is going to be over?!” The length of a graduation speech should not be its most memorable aspect, but too often it is. Think in the 10-minute range — 15 max — bearing in mind that no one gets into trouble for speaking too short.

• Organize around a theme and a few supporting points. This approach will help you in preparation, and the audience will better retain your comments. Ask yourself, “What answer would I want someone to give when asked “So, what was the speech was about?’ ” The answer you want — ideally expressed in a single sentence — can serve as your theme, or at least its essence. Once you have a theme, which you might want to suggest as the title of your remarks in the printed program, support it with three points.

• Focus on what you’ve learned, not what you’ve done. Graduation day is about the students and their future, not you and your past. This is not to diminish your possibly substantial and impressive accomplishments, but they should speak for themselves and be covered by the person who introduces you. In fact, when you submit biographical information to the institution before graduation day, enumerate a few of the accomplishments that prompted the invitation for you speak. It is likely that they will be used verbatim in the introduction and perhaps even in the event’s printed program. Use your time to share valuable nuggets you have learned in your career, be they guiding principles, mistakes to avoid, effective decision-making … things graduates can apply moving forward, no matter their career path.

• Avoid attempts at humor. You shouldn’t start with a joke. Or end with one. Or even stick one in the middle. Humor’s risks far outweigh its benefits. This is not to say that you shouldn’t inject some humanity and personality into your comments. You should, but only as they relate to your message, and your audience. Anecdotes, illustrations, personal references, yes. Humor for humor’s sake, no.

• Plan your delivery as carefully as your message. Audiences remember how something is said longer than they recall what is said. This has become increasingly so in today’s visual society. If a message is not conveyed in a compelling manner, its chances of being absorbed, much less remembered, drop dramatically. I am not saying that style is more important than substance, but for that substance to have impact, at least as much thought and planning need to be given to a talk’s delivery as its content. Thus, you should do at least one complete run-through in a setting that replicates as much as possible the commencement venue. Videotape yourself, paying particular attention to how well you convey key points supporting your theme.

• Do not use a script. Nothing, absolutely nothing, turns an audience off faster than being read to in the flat, uninspiring tone that a script prompts. If you are going to use a script, why not just e-mail it to everyone? Use notes, but organize them around your central theme and key points. It is perfectly fine to refer to notes but only to get a thought, not every word and syllable. You should know the topic. Whether you verbally cross every T and dot every I doesn’t matter — conveying your primary message and the points that support it does.

Journée internationale contre l'Homophobie

The Top 5 Skills Students Need For Their Future: The Results Are In!

The Top 5 Skills Students Need For Their Future: The Results Are In!

Thank you to everyone who responded to my survey calling for the Top 5 Skills students need for their future. The list to choose from initially came from one included in my book, ‘Tween Crayons and Curfews: Tips for Middle School Teachers. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t more that I would like to see on the list, but my point was to examine what the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has to say as it relates to its goal of College and Career Readiness.

So, I initially asked myself, what does that mean exactly to those in higher education and business? The following list of 13 skills (an excerpt from my book) is based on the responses of leaders in both colleges and businesses when asked what skills K-12 education should be providing for the students of tomorrow.

1. Collaboration – learn how to work in groups. It’s a given in the business world and has become a given in our global community.
2. Communication – learn how to talk to anybody at a party. Learn how to speak with respect to both the waitress and the owner of the restaurant. Learn how to talk to your boss and your co-workers. Learn how to write an email, leave a voicemail, and even shake a hand. Learn to read the communication of gestures and expressions, and understand what your gestures and expressions send out as well.
3. Problem-Solving – learn how to research answers and solutions. Learn where to go and how to get there.
4. Decision-making – learn how to be definitive.
5. Understanding Bias – learn how to recognize agendas.
6. Leadership – learn how to be a leader, not a ruler.
7. Questioning – learn to be skeptical appropriately (see above section), to question with clarity, and to inquire calmly. Learn to question as a means to guide others to an answer, and learn how to use questioning as a means to make your own knowledge deeper.
8. Independent Learning – Learn to Find Answers Yourself
9. Compromise – Learn to find contentment even while giving something up. Learn to find contentment with finding a middle ground.
10. Summarizing – Learn to get to the point.
11. Sharing the Air – Learn to shut up. Learn to that you can learn from others.
12. Persuasion – learn use the art of persuasion both in the written and spoken word.
13. Goal Setting – learn to define your quarry and hunt it down. Learn to identify and visualize where you want to get to and the path that can get you there.
So this past weekend, I asked colleagues and friends and followers and readers to answer a survey to help me whittle the list down to the top 5.
And the winners are:
Collaboration
Communication
Problem-Solving
Questioning
Independent Learning
The next question is, are teachers at least using these 5 in their everyday lesson planning? And if so, how? The key is to use these skills to promote content in lesson planning, note taking, and assessments.
Over the next few weeks I’ll share some lessons that you can do to address these skills and for you to mull over for Someday or use on Monday. Hope you’ll share some of your lessons with me and my readers in this thread as well. After all, collaboration is a key future skill and one that must be modeled by the teachers in the room

The Courage To Blog With Students

By Marsha Ratzel

Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org.

When I asked my students recently how blogging in class makes a difference to them, they had lots to say. Blogging has allowed them to meet students from all over the world and discover new interests. It's also helped them improve their technology skills and write more on assignments than they could if they had to use paper and pencil.
But for the teacher, bringing blogging into the classroom can be both thrilling and terrifying at the same time. No doubt about it, making the decision to try student blogging is an act of courage. With that in mind, I’d like to share eight things I’ve learned that can help ensure your brave step is also a wise and successful one for you and your kids.
Tip #1: The best way to get your feet wet without drowning is to use a group blog. On a group blog, the whole class participates together. Teachers provide the writing prompt, and students reply in the comments section. The most popular blogging platforms are Edublogs, Word Press, Blogger, posterous, and kidblog. Depending on the software, teachers can have moderating controls set so comments appear immediately or stay in the queue until the teacher "approves" them. You may want your blog to house student work that looks like traditional assignments (e.g., writing portfolios or story drafts). Or the blog could have student writers reporting on the day’s classroom activities, or sharing their artwork, or what they’ve learned during the semester. Sometimes comments might be specific to a class assignment from history, math, or science.
Be sure to set up your class blogging guidelines from the first day. Post them on your class blog, send them home to parents, and make a poster for your classroom. There are outstanding examples of such guidelines at classroom blogs like Dare to Care, iThink, or the Bayonne High School Band.
Tip #2: Teach students how to write comments. It's a critical skill they won't possess without practice. Let them read lots of high-quality examples. Find other classes that blog, then cut and paste sets of comments that demonstrate thoughtfulness and excellent writing techniques. Have students evaluate your examples and identify why they're good. Students must be taught from the beginning that we expect them to go well beyond comments like "Wow, that was a great post." Or "I really liked what you wrote." Encourage them to write something that shows they actually read the post, that makes a connection between the writer and the reader. Show them examples of students encouraging a blog author. More than 30 people commented on this girl’s story of her father’s early life in Inner Mongolia. By reviewing it, you'll get a peek at the power of students helping other students gain their online voices.
Tip #3: Use what you already have in your teaching plan, with some minor modifications. The biggest difference between a blog and the typical class writing assignment is that blogging invites a digital conversation. Teachers need to tailor assignments to this purpose. With a bit of tweaking, you can take a traditional task and customize it for a blog. When I wanted students to summarize what they'd learned about ancient China, the prompt was "Let’s Talk Shang," where they were to convince the reader of the most important Shang dynasty achievements. In another assignment, they had to post a blog comment to explain whether John Brown was a terrorist or a martyr. These assignments started off as the traditional "Explain three achievements of the Shang dynasty" and "How did John Brown’s action spark the start of the Civil War?"
Tip #4: Practice commenting without computers. A terrific first post activity is to actually not blog electronically. Post the prompt in a place visible to all. Remind everyone what they learned by reading the comments of other students and classes. What made some of them really interesting to read? Give each student a Post-it on which they can write their response. They can then post the sticky under the prompt. Check out how this teacher tried the technique with her students.
Students can then look at each other's comments, trying to find things that are done well and meet the requirements of the prompt. They might compare the ones they like best. With a different color Post-it, students can respond to (or challenge) what their classmates have posted and physically attach their comment. I used the gallery walk instructional strategy to have students stroll and examine the posts on the board. If they see enough examples of good writing, they'll learn what they should be doing.
Eventually all the notes will begin to nest under different comments and get quite long. You might leave these up for a week or two until it seems all the commenting is done and then spend time discussing the writing process. This computer-free commenting and writing can be repeated several times with different prompts until the teacher feels the students understand the commenting and responding process and have lots of examples of what to do and not do.
Tip #5: Make student use of the class blog a privilege. The privilege has to be earned by showing responsibility and a commitment to excellence. This may not be the outlook of all teachers, but it seems critical that students realize their work will be representing not just themselves, but the teacher, the school, and the district, in front of the whole world. Their work should show that they take pride in their writing, understand Internet safety, and can offer insights about the ideas discussed. If it takes five revisions to accomplish that standard of quality the first time out, it's time well spent.
My first class Internet post in September took almost three weeks to brainstorm, write, edit, revise, and polish before I was willing to share what they had to say with the world. It set a tone for the entire year: You have to do your best. The benefit of setting the bar like this is that students feel a huge sense of accomplishment when you ultimately accept their comments. In my classroom, it has generated more self-esteem than almost anything else I’ve done.
An easy way to enforce this standard without a lot of false starts is to have students complete a pre-writing activity using a word processor. The pre-write will help them organize their ideas and know what they’re going to say (which always improves the quality of their writing). Using a word processor allows for spell check, and you can easily review saved drafts and explain what needs to be revised to meet the posting standard.
Tip #6: You can’t emphasize safety too much. Use your school and district guidelines as a starting point—blogging creates an opportunity for students to actually apply the rules they've been taught. The first lessons students need to learn include the difference between public and private Web information and how to share ideas and information safely. My students, for example, have learned they can tell people they love basketball and even the name of their favorite college or pro team, but they cannot tell them their school team's name. As students become more advanced in blogging, they’ll also have to learn about copyright laws and how to cite their sources.
Tip #7: Decide how you will choose usernames. You should make this decision before you talk to students about blogging. Some teachers allow students to use their first names only, some require them to create online names, and some assign online names. There’s no right solution; it’s a matter of balancing the security needs of your classroom, parents, and the school. Sometimes software lets students create customized avatars. They love this activity. For some excellent places to create school-appropriate avatars for free, read Mrs. Watanabe’s account.
Tip #8: Communicate with parents early on. Explain what you’re going to do and enlist their support and help. Many parents have jobs that require them to maintain a professional blog or read their company’s blog. Capitalize on that by asking them to comment on the things that appear in your class discussions. Maybe they can do it weekly or once a month. At Mrs. Morris's school, May is "Getting Parents Involved in Blogging" month.
I think it’s best to have students work with only the group blog for at least a semester, until the posting and commenting processes feel very comfortable. Once you have the class blogging down pat, and students are performing well and feeling comfortable, you might move them into their own blogs. That decision comes with a new set of considerations, including overseeing blog design, moderating postings, and dealing with technology glitches.

When You're Ready for a Challenge

One of my favorite online activities is the Student Blogging Challenge. It's sponsored by Edublogs and starts each September and March. Over 10 weeks, students can choose from dozens of activities and chat with peers from all over the world. When the Student Challenges are running, Edublogs also offers the Teacher Challenge, a series of professional development activities during which teachers can sharpen blogging skills and learn about the technology behind the tools. See Get Blogging with Students and Kick Start Your Blogging. With both beginner and advanced teacher groups, there’s a lot to learn and there are many tuned-in colleagues to meet.
Blogging makes sense to students. In their words, it makes school fun. I believe if I’m holding them to high writing standards and content standards and they’re enjoying the process and writing more, then I’ve found a successful instructional strategy.

Marsha Ratzel is a National Board-certified teacher in the Blue Valley School District in Kansas, where she teaches middle school math, science, and sometimes social studies. To read more of her writing about her teaching practice, visit her blog Reflections of a Techie.