The School Recruitment Handbook

A Guide to Attracting, Selecting and Keeping Outstanding Teachers

Sharon Crabtree, Russell Hobby, Jennifer Ibbetson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781138147799
• eBook ISBN: 9781134349616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Good teachers are distinguished by their characteristics - passion, integrity, initiative, confidence and more - yet recruitment tends to focus on skills and knowledge. Skills are vital, but are not the whole picture.

This handbook provides a comprehensive technique for spotting and assessing the deeper characteristics of outstanding teachers during interview, using the Hay McBer research into effective teaching.

Spotting an outstanding teacher, however, is wasted if they are not attracted to the school. Included in this guide is a means of evaluating, improving and communicating a school's attractiveness to candidates and existing staff.

Providing a pathway through the complex recruitment process - from defining the school's needs to welcoming the new recruit into the school - this book includes:

• research into teacher effectiveness
• critical incident interviews
• definition and attraction
• assessment
• induction.

Presenting surveys, original research into effective teaching, and interviews with recruiters and recruits, this lively guide offers practical advice for all schools.

1
Introduction

Something more

Teaching is a complex mixture of skills, passion and common sense, a blend of the deeply practical with the thoroughly impractical. A good teacher knows the tips and techniques of behaviour management, they know how to structure a lesson, how to assess work fairly and productively, they know about the curriculum. But there is something more, perhaps a love of the subject or a passion for social justice, a deep respect for the value of other lives, roots in the community or a knack for creating clarity, even something as simple as a sense of humour. Outstanding teachers are defined by their personal and professional characteristics as much as by their skills and knowledge.

So why do we spend so much time on skills and knowledge? Because we can test them, measure them, issue qualifications to guarantee them, fit them neatly into a bullet point on a CV or application form. They are the basis of inspection and evaluation, and cannot be ignored, but an outstanding teacher has so much more

Thus the irony of current practice in teacher selection and recruitment. We spend most of our time assessing attributes which contribute to only a small proportion of on-the-job success (and which are relatively easily acquired by someone with the ‘knack’). For the remainder, the very essence of outstanding teaching, we rely on the gut feel and instinct of heads and their leadership teams.

In this book, we turn traditional recruitment practice on its head and present a reliable process for identifying – through interview – the deeper professional characteristics that contribute to outstanding teaching. We show how to create consistent benchmarks, record appropriate information and make decisions between candidates on the basis of their professional characteristics.

We also emphasise that recruitment is as much about communication as selection. We will show you how to increase your pool of applicants while using your recruitment communications to act as a filter in their own right. This is not a cosmetic exercise. It means creating the working conditions that create job satisfaction; it means clarifying who you are and then designing compelling propositions around that identity. We therefore introduce a theory of ‘total reward’ that will help you build a workplace that attracts, motivates and retains new and existing staff.

Like the effective teacher, this book combines principles and practical application. In the first section, we introduce a research-based model of teaching characteristics and the rigorous ‘Critical Incident Interviewing’ process which elicits evidence about them. In the second half, we embed these principles into an end-to-end recruitment process suitable for a wide range of schools. This runs from the design of the person specification to placing the advertisement, from sifting applications to conducting interviews, from making the offer to planning the induction.

We use the Hay McBer model of teacher effectiveness, created in research for the DfES in 1999. This project sought out outstanding and effective teachers and asked: What are they doing that sets them apart? The answers provided a comprehensive and concrete list of the enduring patterns of teacher behaviour associated with high value added. We are not, however, wedded to a single view of what makes an outstanding teacher. The model is merely one source of criteria, well suited to this approach, but could be supplemented with others more appropriate to the needs of your school. Indeed, we introduce a roles and culture audit process that will help your leadership team clarify the sort of values and perspectives you are seeking in order to build or strengthen your school’s ethos. This will not always, we hope, be someone who fits the mould or blends in – occasionally it will include people who will shake things up, break the unwritten rules and introduce new horizons.

We cannot, therefore, offer a ready built, one-size-fits-all model of the perfect teacher – they don’t exist – but a process to define what you’re looking for and select for it reliably.

As education reform gathers pace in the UK, the need for a reliable method of spotting and developing characteristics becomes even more urgent. If we are looking for schools to build their own internal capacity for improvement, the research on school effectiveness suggests that certain attributes come to the fore: collaboration (between teachers and between schools), team working, shared leadership at every level, a willingness to experiment, the sharing of knowledge, vision and enthusiasm, openness to feedback. You can’t send someone on a course to give them enthusiasm. You can’t become a lifelong learner from reading a book. These behaviours are all rooted in enduring professional characteristics like empathy, confidence and respect for others.

Change in schools rests on the quality of the people, before the processes and systems. The current direction of education reform demands a method of recruitment that not only selects for the professional characteristics associated with each teacher’s broader leadership role but which, by doing so, symbolises and emphasises their value. For the way we are chosen by an organisation sets the tone for how we will behave once we join.

The problems with traditional recruitment

Traditional interviewing techniques are unreliable, with a poor record of spotting the best candidate. We recruit too many people who never fit in – who are not meant for teaching or, worse, who would make perfectly good teachers in a different school but fail to meet their potential in their current environment. This situation becomes particularly acute as heads widen their nets in response to the recruitment crisis, seeking overseas teachers or recruiting and training their own graduates. The techniques espoused in this book are even more crucial in these circumstances, where we can’t rely on track record or the pre-selection that occurs in teacher training colleges. We really are looking for the behaviour and characteristics that will help someone acquire the skills and knowledge, while surviving the first painful months.

Not only do traditional interviews contain a strong subjective element, allowing our inherent biases to creep in, they also give candidates too much room to manoeuvre, to please the interviewer. Although a candidate’s principles are important, the principles espoused in the comfort of the head’s office are no guide to behaviour in the classroom. Although teamwork and collegiality are crucial, simply having been part of a team once is no guarantee that you played a helpful role. Simply: what people say is not a good guide to what they do. Traditional processes permit a great deal of conjecture, philosophising and evasion. Most people hate to lie directly in an interview, but they can let the interviewer’s imagination do the work for them:

Well, in general I would approach such a child firmly but avoid confrontation.

Would you? Do you, under the stress of a disruptive class?

We successfully implemented the initiative three months before it became compulsory.

And you . . . Led the team? Made the coffee?

I think children should be treated with respect.

Do you treat them with respect?

Yet it is possible to get at what people actually do, and thus the beliefs and principles which genuinely guide their behaviour, through the interview process. The Critical Incident Technique introduced in Chapter 3 is gruelling (and strangely cathartic) for both parties, yet produces a detailed evidence base for every candidate. The aim of the Critical Incident Interview is to generate spontaneous contributions from candidates about concrete behaviour at work. It can replace those vague earlier statements, for example, with more useful comments:

I said to Jonathan, ‘leave the Walkman with Paul for now, we’ll discuss who it belongs to after the lesson and get to the bottom of it.’

I ensured the team had the resources it needed to work quickly. I met with the project leader weekly and followed a protocol which I’d designed. . . .

I noticed Nicky was upset because she was quieter than usual in the art lesson. I didn’t broach the topic in front of her friends, that would only embarrass her, but caught up with her in the corridor. . . .

With this sort of information we know how someone chooses to behave on the job – a selection process second only to having shadowed them for the last six months.

The benefits of a new approach

The benefits of the Critical Incident Interview, allied with a detailed model of teacher effectiveness, are considerable:

• Firstly, it places a needed emphasis on the art and passion of teaching. With such emphasis beginning at recruitment and running throughout the school’s ethos, it becomes the foundation of the school.
• Second, it makes interviews fairer, as people are recruited via a rigorous, documented process, on the basis of enduring character traits rather than academic opportunity, personal background or career history.
• Third, it reduces the waste of time and energy created by bad career moves, either as a first placement or later on in a career, as it focuses on the fit between personality and ethos.
• Fourth, it focuses training and professional development where it can have the greatest impact. If we can discover people with the right professional characteristics we can provide them with access to skills and knowledge more easily than trying to make someone who never really liked children in the first place succeed.
• Fifth, this approach emphasises diversity and the variety of context. It is a process that helps you start from generic models but create unique specifications to move your school forward.
• Last, it emphasises the leadership and collaborative roles of all modern teachers, whatever their level, by helping you select for initiative, empathy, accountability and confidence.

You will discover greater numbers of more effective teachers, who belong in your school and who therefore stay for longer. You will discover people in all walks of life who have the passion, commitment, clarity of thought and energy to be outstanding teachers and make the most of the training they are given. This can only improve education and achievement.

This book won’t solve the teacher recruitment crisis. It is not a systemic solution – and it has no aims in this regard. It won’t increase the number of graduates who view teaching as an attractive career and it won’t remove the burdens of paperwork, public scrutiny and pay that cause some to leave the profession. However, if we can widen the pool of potential applicants to include those with the talent, but not yet the skills, and if we can improve the fit between candidate and institution, thus retaining more people in the profession, then we are doing more than make schools a little better at competing with each other for a diminishing pool of candidates. We are finding the best teachers for pupils and the best schools for teachers.

The role of skills and knowledge

At no point do we want to appear to denigrate the role of skills and knowledge in effec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• Part 1: Core Concepts and Techniques
• Part 2: The Complete Recruitment Process
• Part 3: Practical Exercises and Materials