The chief tool is employing quality teachers in the interview. Yes, of course, before the interview, the personnel department employs various criteria—experience, academic background, recommendations—to select candidates that would warrant an interview. Along with the criteria developed to select candidates for interviews, districts do develop a set of interview questions that will bring some semblance of validity and reliability to the process. The questions posed to a teacher in main offices fall into three categories: philosophical, institutional, personal. Listed below are the questions that are typically asked in each category:
Philosophical: Questions that are rarely asked
- How do children learn?
2. What knowledge is of most worth?
3. How should knowledge be organized?
4. How should we assess what students understand?
5. HOW SHOULD WE TEACH?
Personal: Break the ice questions
1. Why did you become a teacher?
2. Why do you want to work at this school?
3. What personality traits to teachers need to be successful?
4. Can you tell me about your favorite teachers when you were a student? What qualities did they have that you try to emulate on a daily basis?
Institutional: Questions that are typically asked
1. How do you approach discipline and what role does it play in learning?
2. What do you think of technology in the classroom and how have you integrated it in your classroom?
3. How have local state and local curriculum standards affected your lesson planning process?
4. How do you approach instances of bullying?
5. What is your process for creating a lesson plan?
6. What is your grading process like?
7. How do you feel about extra credit?
8. What extracurricular activities would you feel comfortable coaching or sponsoring?
They typical length of an interview session in a main office is one hour. When you consider questions related to a particular need or problem in a district—bullying, low test scores, coaching vacancies, mandates—there is little or no time to delve deeply into a candidate’s instructional worldview—their philosophy of education.
Most administrators would view the asking of philosophical questions as an enormous waste of time—the practicalities of managing a school and classrooms are far more important that an ivory tower musing over big questions with no definitive answers. The drawback to focusing on the particulars of implementation is ignoring how those particulars fit together, if at all. Philosophy is a foundational tool for organizing the particulars of implementation into a coherent system for analyzing concepts, definitions, arguments, problems, and questions of value.
Once one understands a candidate’s philosophy of teaching and learning, the particulars of implementation should be self-evident. This does mean that no implementation questions should be asked. In fact, to confirm a candidate’s instructional worldview, a few well-chosen implementation questions should be posed to see if there are any discrepancies between a candidate’s why and how.
Of course, the assumption I am making, are main offices that have authored a district or schoolwide instructional worldview. Typically, school mission statements should serve this function. However, as I have pointed out in my most recent book few school districts live up to their district’s mission statement (Living Up to Your School Mission Statement: Reforming Schools from the Inside Out). Without attention to an agreed upon school mission, main offices become consumed with the managerial functions of schooling, which, in turn, reduce all aspects of schooling—the interview being one—to the particulars of implementation.
Alan C. Jones 