The hiring process

A very nice article here about the expectations of teaching in the coming years and what administrators need to do to make the process effective. From the above link;

Teachers Wanted: Must be Prepared for Constant Change and Re-Training and In- servicing for the Rest of their Careers
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Michael F. Shaughnessy
Eastern New Mexico University
Delia Stafford
Haberman Foundation

TOP TEN ADMONISHMENTS TO SCHOOL HIRING OFFICIALS

1. Be Honest. Discuss your students, discuss the resources that teachers have, and discuss the turnover rate in your district and be selective in who you hire

2. Be Up-Front- Talk about the morale at the current time and your guesses, hunches and beliefs for the future.

3. Be Sincere- School systems want and need teachers and hiring officials should reflect this. But also indicate that teachers are expected to coach, do the school newspaper, sponsor the cheerleaders, be assistant track coaches, help with the chess time, and the school year book, just the hem of the list..

4. Stay honest!. Applicants at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado , may know what transpired there a few years back. But there may have been incidents in Idaho , or California or other states in the Union . Should applicants be aware of these things? We will leave this to the reader to decide, remembering always, our prisons are full of Kinder Kids...someone perhaps could have said a kind word, somewhere,sometime,even changed the direction of a child even if the "parents appeared to have little or no interested". IT ONLY TAKES ONE TEACHER, ONE TEACHER WITH THE RIGHT STUFF, TO CHANGE THE LIFE OF A CHILD !

5. And 5 th ,no hiring official can take the fifth amendment!

6. Be Realistic- No hiring official can predict what will occur over the next 5, 10 or 15 years. During the Reagan administration, no one could have predicted that " A Nation At Risk " might evolve into No Child Left Behind. One should not be optimistic, nor pessimistic, but realistic.

7. Be Up Front- Often teachers are hired at the last minute (I know I was.and not once but twice) and hiring officials need to be wise, prudent and judicious about what they say to recently hired teachers. If classroom management is paramount and important, that needs to be communicated. If " full inclusion" is the order of the day, that needs to be stated. If sports, and homecoming events and the like are the most important items on the agenda, let that be said.

8. Be sure to mention " Highly Qualified" and what that may mean today, tomorrow and years down the road. I suspect that teachers are going to have to undergo much more rigorous training in the future as the world becomes more complex and teachers more accountable to get pay raises

9. Be cautious, since student's lives are literally in the hands of teachers. Witness the recent teacher who compared George Bush to Hitler. Well, any straight thinking Martian knows that Hitler had a moustache and George Bush does not. But in all seriousness, one wonders about the malleable, shapeable minds of children and what the rantings and ravings of some individual might do to the thinking processes of children and adolescents. And witness a teacher in Florida who apparently had some type of sexual alliance with a student. How will that student's emotional and psychological life be affected by this alleged " bi-polar" teacher who cannot seem to gratify her urges appropriately.

10 BEWARE ! on both sides of the desk when asking questions to determine "who to hire"!!!!. THE FAINT OF HEART NEED NOT APPLY!

Dumbing Down the Teaching Profession, Part Deux

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. Now, NCLB will be used as an instrument to weed out teachers who aren't teaching to the test. One would think, given the empirical evidence, that the teacher's unions would have spent some time working to eradicate NCLB from litany of national disgraces the Bush administration has visited upon us.

But NOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooo..............

Check this out:

Who's Really Fit To Teach?
`No-Child' Report Questions Teacher Skills
April 4, 2006
By ROBERT A. FRAHM, Courant Staff Writer

"The U.S. Department of Education has issued a new monitoring report that throws into question the qualifications of more than 13,000 teachers, about 30 percent of the state's public school teaching force, state officials say.

State education officials have vowed to challenge the report's conclusion that many teachers - especially older elementary teachers and those teaching social studies and special education classes - do not meet the criteria established under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The findings, to be outlined at a State Board of Education meeting this week, could mean that even some of the state's most highly regarded teachers would have to undergo job reviews or possibly even take tests or further training to demonstrate their competence."

Quality Control, Growing Teachers, and Xenophobia

A most interesting New York Times Editorial post on improving education. Well worth clicking on the link for the full text. Here's an appetizer;

Why the United States Should Look to Japan for Better Schools

By BRENT STAPLES
Published: November 21, 2005

-snip-

The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board.

Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad - especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons.

Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is "nothing like ours." Nevertheless, the Japanese system has features that could be fruitfully imitated here, as the education reformers James Stigler and James Hiebert pointed out in their book "The Teaching Gap," published in 1999.

The book has spawned growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known as "lesson study," allows teachers to revise and refine lessons that are then shared with others, sometimes through video and sometimes at conventions. In addition to helping novices, this system builds a publicly accessible body of knowledge about what works in the classroom.

The lesson-study groups focus on refining methods that improve student understanding. In doing so, the groups go step by step, laying out successful strategies for teaching specific lessons. This reflects the Japanese view that successful teaching is the product of intensive teacher development and self-scrutiny. In America, by contrast, novice teachers are often presumed competent on Day One. They have few opportunities in their careers to watch successful colleagues in action. We also tend to believe that educational change would happen overnight - if only we could find the right formula. This often leaves us prey to fads that put schools on the wrong track.

There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region. The countries that are leaving us behind in math and science decide at the national level what students should learn and when. The schools are typically overseen by ministries of education that spend a great deal of time on what might be called educational quality control.

-snip-

Faced with lagging test scores and pressure from the federal government, some school officials have embraced the dangerous but all-too-common view that millions of children are incapable of high-level learning. This would be seen as heresy in Japan. But it is fundamental to the American system, which was designed in the 19th century to provide rigorous education for only about a fifth of the students, while channeling the rest into farm and factory jobs that no longer exist.

The United States will need a radically different mind set to catch up with high-performing competitors. For starters we will need to focus as never before on the process through which teachers are taught to teach. We will also need to drop the arrogance and xenophobia that have blinded us to successful models developed abroad.