Interviewing

For this weeks seminar, we were joined by two extremely informative guests, both in hiring positions at their respective schools and districts. While I am still a ways out from the interviewing stage, I guess it’s never to early to begin thinking about it!

What I gained most from the speakers was the specific questions. There are a million possibilities for what an interviewer might ask, so it was nice to have them refine that list down and explain why certain questions are asked. For instance, I had never thought about or understood why “icebreaker” type questions were helpful for anything but breaking the ice. It makes complete sense now that the interviewer is gaining important information from can this person think creatively and out of the box, to are they really listening to the question I am asking.

The interview process is an intimidating one, but hearing from these two women I can see it as more of a personal process. This is not only about a school finding the right teacher just to fill a classroom, but about making sure that a teacher is in the right school. The speakers spent a lot of time discussing researching a school before the interview and preparing plenty of your own questions, and it made me think about how an interview should not be this scary “Will they choose me?” type of experience, but instead asking yourself “Is this the right school for me to become the teacher I want to be?”

School Safety Panel

I truly believe in the saying “it takes a village.” While it might be trite and overused, it applies to the way our society works, especially our schools. In the discussions on school safety, trauma, and violence, the conversation continually comes back to the community that we create for our students. In the wake of trauma, make sure that there is open communication, that students feel they are in a safe environment, keep parents in the loop and informed, involved every level of staff, come together. Before trauma should be no different.

After listening to conversations in my classes, panels in the evening, discussions outside of class with peers, it always comes back to the connections you make. Establishing an open, caring environment starts the moment students enter the room, not the moment trauma does. If that line of communication and comfort does not exist prior to traumatic events, it might be too late to open it up when it does. At both panel discussions, all of the panelists emphasized the focus on not only listening to students, but making sure they students know you are listening. Everything the panelists said honestly sounded like common sense. I think one of the hardest things about teacher education programs though, is preparing us for the day we are too wearied to think about those things that seemed so common sense but are devalued by a system pressuring testing only. Right now, all my classmates and I are unified in our feelings that we will never let a student go unnoticed, miss a warning sign or moment we could help, or listen to our students needs.

Conversations like these panels need to be ongoing so that we remember that feeling in five years when Sandy Hook has become a more distant twinge rather than a distinctly painful memory. As long as the conversation does not stop, I believe there will be a day when no teacher thinks that caring for the emotional well being of a student is secondary to teaching to a test or chooses to think, just get through the year, then it’s not my problem anymore.