Monthly Archives: March 2016

How To Hire The Best Teachers

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Teachers are the key

Student experience and learning

Research has shown again and again that the single most important element in student success is effective teachers. Additional research has identified behavior themes that are common to effective teachers.

See: Impact of Teacher Effectiveness on Student Achievement

http://www.targetsuccess.biz/wp/the-impact-of-teacher-effectiveness-on-student-achievement/

See: Behavior Characteristics of Effective Teachers

http://www.targetsuccess.biz/wp/the-importance-of-hiring-only-the-most-talented-teachers-2/

Positive and effective school culture

Teachers are the backbone of a school so it follows that a culture of excellence and supporting excellence in teaching is driven by the teaching staff in collaboration with administration. Positive and effective culture depends on quality teachers and effective leadership.

Problems with traditional hiring approaches

The “traditional” approach to hiring can take any number of forms but generally includes ideas like

  • Hiring people you know
  • Hiring referrals
  • Extensive interviewing

Unfortunately, in most cases, these are very subjective processes and tend to focus on selecting for reasons that are not tuned to finding the BEST teacher candidates regardless of where they come from.

What most leaders don’t know, yet should know, is what happens in the traditional hiring process. Continue reading →

Traditional teacher qualifications have little influence on classroom achievement

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Teacher experience and education level are characteristics are commonly assumed to correlate with greater teacher effectiveness.

However, when researchers analyzed student achievement data along with teacher qualifications, they found that a five-year increase in teaching experience affected student achievement very little — less than 1 percentage point. Similarly, the level of education held by a teacher proved to have no effect on student achievement in the classroom. These findings have implications for the way in which teacher quality and effectiveness should be assessed and valued by a school district. Continue reading →

Problems with Traditional Hiring Approaches

Posted on by

The “traditional” approach to hiring can take any number of forms but generally includes ideas like:

  • Hiring people you know
  • Hiring referrals
  • Extensive interviewing

Unfortunately, in most cases, these are very subjective processes and tend to focus on selecting for reasons that are not tuned to finding the BEST teacher candidates regardless of where they come from.

What most leaders don’t know, yet should know, is what happens in the traditional hiring process. Continue reading →

The Impact of Teacher Effectiveness on Student Achievement

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Impact of Teacher Effectiveness on Student Achievement

The work of Bill Sanders, formerly at the University of Tennessee’s Value-Added Research and Assessment Center, has been pivotal in reasserting the importance of the individual teacher on student learning.4  One aspect of his research has been the additive or cumulative effect of teacher effectiveness on student achievement. Over a multi-year period, Sanders focused on what happened to students whose teachers produced high achievement versus those whose teachers produced low achievement results. He discovered that when children, beginning in 3rd grade, were placed with three high-performing teachers in a row, they scored on average at the 96th percentile on Tennessee’s statewide mathematics assessment at the end of 5th grade. When children with comparable achievement histories starting in 3rd grade were placed with three low-performing teachers in a row, their average score on the same mathematics assessment was at the 44th percentile, an enormous 52-percentile point difference for children who presumably had comparable abilities and skills. Elaborating on this body of research, Dr. Sanders and colleagues reported the following: Continue reading →