Teacher hiring, mentoring, and performance in schools

School Personnel Functions

Personnel functions and their relationship to moving an instructional agenda forward

Ultimately, a school's reputation lies in the hands of its teachers. Hiring, training, and retaining highly effective personnel to give instruction in the classroom must be the cornerstone of any effort to improve education at a school. Without good teachers to impart instruction, the best textbooks, goals, and procedures will not be meaningful. Teaching, however, is a skill as well as a gift, and the administration can strive to support teachers with specific programming efforts.

Programming

In the age of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), viewing teacher performance in terms of students' standardized test scores is an inevitability. Teachers often feel pressured to 'teach to the test' and feel a loss of control over how their classrooms are structured. It is essential that teachers with classes who are flagged at risk be consulted as to why this is the case, and involved in any changes in curriculum development. Reform must not be done something 'to' teachers, rather teachers and administrators must work together, even if there may be less flexibility in terms of lesson planning in some instances, because of the need to meet state benchmarks. The essential goal of education must not be lost. A school designed "serve children from the community over time becomes a place focused on keeping itself afloat, with the staffs working in part to ensure its continued employment" if there is too much focus on short-term numeric improvement on standardized tests (Olsen & Sexton 2009).

There is no single prescription or style for success in teaching and every teacher develops his or her own individual style. Also, different demographic groups may demand different teaching approaches. "A study of 31 high-performing teachers in low-performing urban schools found that these teachers had certain traits in common. They were strict; they taught in traditional, explicit ways; there was little time in their classrooms when instruction was not occurring; and they moved around the room helping their students" (Poplin 2011). More creative, team-based interaction, however, may be warranted in different educational environments. Size of the classroom, ability level, morale of students and teachers, and the need to meet standards all determine how teachers approach their tasks. Micro-managing teacher demeanor in the classroom is seldom effective. But offering new instructional strategies and creating a learning environment for teachers who may benefit from changing their pedagogical approach may be useful.

Observations and lesson plans

Using teachers as leaders to help guide the instructional and evaluative process is becoming increasingly popular. Highly effective teachers can be sought out to provide advice about guiding new teachers and general school programming. "Three components of the role of a new cadre of professional educators...include 1 mentoring and coaching other teachers; 2 professional development and review of school practice; and 3 school-level decision making" (Crowther 1997). Teachers as well as administrators can be actively involved in the process of observing new teachers to provide guidance. Teachers can also pool their collective resources when structuring new lesson plans, to enable them to learn best practices from colleagues.

Teacher observations are always fraught with anxiety. But if teachers are integrated into the process of constructively critiquing colleagues, being observed becomes less of an 'us vs. them' proposition, and more of a dynamic method of moving forward to improve education as a whole. If all teachers are observed, not simply new teachers or teachers with students that have low ratings on their standardized tests, the process of observation becomes less of a punishment and more of push to move the institution as a whole to meet its goals. Ideally, observation and the subsequent critique should be a source of creative ferment in terms of how lessons are structured, not simply a judgment upon the teacher's abilities.