Hiring a New Teacher?

As we balance ourselves as teachers between the long slough from winter break to spring break our attentions simultaneously turn to thinking of next year.  From putting together a master schedule to a calendar my attention becomes increasingly divided.  One thing that I have never had time to do is overhaul our hiring process.

There are two reasons I think I have never put too much time into it.  First, as part of a big district our hiring process is somewhat constrained by district protocols.  Sometimes they help, oftentimes they don't.  The bigger problem of me though is the lack of wonderful candidates from whom to choose.  Why would I put a ton of time into choosing between two of three candidates when there is usually a clear favorite?  An obvious cost-benefit analysis that usually turns my attention elsewhere.

However, how would I hire in a situation where I had what economists would call a "thick market?"  I have bandied ideas around in my head, and here are some:

1. What if I had applicants grade a series of tests with known flaws to see if they could identify them and plan to address them?
2. What if I had assessments with names that identified "kids" ethnically, racial, and by gender to look for discrimination there?
3. What if I then gave them the next lesson that ignored the misconceptions and asked for feedback on the lesson to see if they would back me up?
4. What if I had them grade the test, gave them the Learning Targets, and asked them to rewrite the test in a way that better assessed the learning targets?
5. What if I gave them a case study with a difficult behavior and had them call a parent looking to make things difficult for them to see how they would handle it?
6. What if . . . 

So many what ifs.  What would you want to see if you needed to choose from between 100 apparently equal applicants for a job?

Student Homework - Self-Grading with Witnessing

I have done the 3M TWIST program twice.  The first time with a engineer (Bill?) Coggio, who always reminded me of Sly Stallone, and the second with Yizhong Wong, who helped me understand some of the intricacies of dental fillings.  Interesting things, I highly recommend the program if you are in it's geographic region.

When you do the TWIST program you are issued a 3M notebook like any other engineer and are required to put ALL your work into it.  This is for Intellectual Property (IP) purposes and is taken very seriously.  After my first internship, Megan Olivia Hall (2013 MN Teacher of the Year) and I made lab notebooks a requirement in all science classes and taught it to our middle school colleagues as an example of what Doug Lemov calls "Binder Control" in his book Teach Like a Champion.

Things were going well with the lab note books during my second stint with the TWIST program when I was reintroduced to the 3M notebook and reminded of the witnessing requirement.  The witnessing requirement is in place so that you cannot "back date" any findings to establish IP for your company at the expense of another company or individual.  I began to think about the implications of witnessing in my classroom.

My school, Open World Learning Community, utilizes standards-based grading and reporting, so the completion of homework is de-emphasized.  However, the learning that can occur in homework isn't.  So after my second stint with 3M I instituted a sheet (quarter sheet actually, I'll post) where the students had to fill this out AND get it witnessed by a peer or I would not accept it.  The sheet required the students to do some self-assessment, self-grade, and justify that grade to a peer before I would look at it.

The system, like any in schools, requires some pre-teaching and real maintenance early on.  You have to make sure that the students are being accurate and the witnesses are doing their job.  But quickly one of three things becomes apparent.  First, students are typically much harsher on themselves that I would be.  Second, there becomes a list of student witnesses whose opinion you can trust and conversely, third is that there will be a class of witnessers who need extra training.

Like the most successful initiatives time spend up front is well spent for the time savings down the road.  I can quickly scan the homework and hand it back to students just keeping the quarter sheet to record later.  Students do better work because they have to self-grade AND show their work to a peer.  I would love to hear about other peoples systems and modifications to this one below.


Here is the first one the kids in my Intermediate Algebra class get.  It is partially filled out to help them along: