Three interview questions and their follow-up (all coming from time working as a teacher, a governor, a Head and most recently in ITT in Higher Education) and then some thoughts.
- “Tell us a bit about why you want to be a teacher.” Warm-up question to start the relationship, to get the candidate talking and the panel listening. A sound check for the interview. Except the candidate froze, and grinned nervously and said “Don’t know really.”
- “In which situations do you feel most confident? In which situations do you feel least confident and why?” This is a bit of a cheat, and I must acknowledge my source: Margaret Edgington’s The Foundation Stage Teacher in Action. The candidate is asked to show their self-reflection on the spot. The best one began “That’s a really deep question,” thus buying herself vital time to muster the argument.
- From a job interview: “We have a lot of people in all sorts of roles in this school: tell us a bit about how you understand teamwork.” “Well, as teacher, I see myself as in charge…” And the pens of the interviewers started.
Number one was painful. A half an hour slot for an interview and despite everything we tried, questions were knocked back by increasingly long and embarrassing silences and that dreaded response. Don’t know really. Except she did know, of course; what she couldn’t do was overcome her panic and start talking. I’ve seen panic in interviews in other cases, but this was extreme. At the end of ten minutes we wrapped up.
It spurred me on to getting PGCE students to ask each other questions in a sort of interview game: four students in a group with four envelopes. A opens her/his envelope and turns to B and asks an interview-type question B hasn’t seen and B has to answer it. B then does the same to C… A bit of a giggle – but it impresses on people preparing for interviews that fluency is key. Not gobbiness, but fluency. Rifle quickly through your mental index cards of stories and start with “Well, there was one time when I was in the art base when I was a TA and….”
Number two is there so that I can advertise whole sets of questions around teamwork and curriculum that Edgington poses. They’re not exclusive to early years, and this one – and the third, around team work – might, with a bit of adaptation, come up anywhere. But others might include “How do you know if the children in your class are making progress?” or (this one more or less straight from Edgington, p9) “Can you tell us how you have enabled/could enable a ‘hard to reach’ family to become involved with their children’s learning?” Ask any of these in the interview practice game and a panic starts: but think about the job description you will have had, think about why the question is there. At heart the panel want to know What do you know about record keeping and can you do it? or Have you worked with families before and what’s your vision? The important self-reflective element here is not about to ask the candidate “sell yourself down the river;” the panel wants to know whether you have a real understanding that will sustain you when things go wrong.
What is an interview for? Partly it’s to make sure you are able to put flesh on the bones of your personal statement; partly because you are entering a profession where oral communication is key not just between you and the children, but between you and the TAs, you and the parents, the teacher in the parallel class, the governor linked to your class, the Speech and Language Therapist who visits… And there are some things that are easier teased out by conversation than reading. And this brings me to
Number three. Ouch. This was a tricky one, and having started from there the candidate argued herself into an authoritarian corner from which she would not emerge. The knack again is maybe to ask “What is this question really about?” Maybe your predecessor was immeasurably crap at this and they are looking for a good person to lead the micro-team of the class; maybe there is a recalcitrant resident of the staff room who the Head is hoping you might be the spur to their re-enagegemnt with the school project (and if the Head is hoping for this from an NQT they are either very stupid or very brave); maybe… maybe…. Even with the big hint in the question about “a lot of people in all sorts of roles in this school,” you are unlikely to know exactly what prompts this question, so you have to ask yourself ” Where are my skills? Do I have a story to tell here?” This is where the conversation element of an interview comes into its own. A personal statement that talks about your good team work can now be used as the way into a conversation about attitudes, maybe even your sense of humour.
GSOH: right, a last horror story, even if only a light one. A candidate who wrote “I have a good sense of humour” in an application was once challenged simply at interview with “Tell us a joke, then.” Really? Really?
What on earth is an interview for? Well, the first reason might be that some things on the job description and person specification are very hard to assess on paper or on line. Just like in your reading of the school website and the last OfSTED inspection, this can only take the panel so far. “Drilling down” is a phrase I’ve heard too much, but that is really what the conversational element is/should be about: details, anecdotes, further information. The second reason gets people into serious hot water: face to face interviews tell us what you’re like and (dare I write it?) “whether you’ll fit in.” I must state that I hate this second one, but there it sits, potentially discriminatory, dangerously non-inclusive, menacing an appointments panel from the boundaries between the Head’s responsibility to build and manage an effective team and a possibly illegal unconscious bias for or against this or that person. Good interviewers are at least aware of the baggage they bring; good interview panels work to mimimise the effects of the baggage.
Final point about the interview: what do you do with “Do you have any questions?” As I said in the previous post, a positive answer is better than a weak one, but you might want to know about the school’s support for NQTs, or whether parallel classes plan together, or all sorts of stuff that show you’re interested in them.
I can’t say it enough: this is a two-way process.
nicktomjoe 