Hiring the Best

One PSBA session that I did get to attend was a combined presentation of Quaker Valley and Penn Traffic school districts on "Hiring the Best" teachers.

These districts recently implemented a process for hiring teachers that contains the standard "paper" and "personal" phases (resume, references, interview, etc.), with the interview questions constructed around James Strong’s "Six Qualities of Effective Teachers".

What they did differently was to put in place a "performance" component. The performance phase - where the candidate is given a week to prepare a lesson plan around a particular concept and deliver it to a group of students of the appropriate grade level - struck me as an idea that has potential.

An audience member asked how this would work over the summer, when many new teachers are typically hired. The answer was that students are so enthusiastic about being part of the process - their input is highly valued - that finding enough students to fill a demonstration class has never been an issue. There are other schools who have successfully involved students in faculty interviews - the State College Delta program is one - but I was intrigued by the concept of having even elementary students participate.

They did mention one drawback to "hiring the best": the most talented teachers have a tendency to move on to greener pastures. But they decided that having an excellent teacher – if even for only two or three years - is still preferable to hiring a mediocre teacher who stays for thirty.

Their hiring process is combined with an induction period that lasts a full three years, with teacher evaluation and professional development focused on the "qualities" that were the basis for the initial interviews.