New Leaders for New Schools

Hiring an Aligned Instructional Staff

Ben Fenton

In a series of columns in ASCD Express, the cofounder of New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit for education reform, shares promising practices in principal leadership for improving some of the nation's most challenged urban schools.

Teachers spend more time with students and have a more direct influence on their learning than anyone else in the school building. For this reason, highly effective principals treat the recruitment and selection of teachers as a uniquely powerful opportunity and a sacred responsibility to effect change in students' lives.

They set clear, high standards for teacher candidates, recruit tirelessly, and develop rigorous screening processes to ensure that every new staff member is poised to facilitate student learning at high levels and to contribute positively to the school's culture.

Defining the Selection Criteria

Before they begin the recruiting and selection processes, highly effective principals take the time to identify exactly whom they are looking for. In general, they seek out candidates who demonstrate content knowledge and core pedagogical skills. But they also focus on broader selection criteria that are often overlooked:

• First and foremost, a genuine connection to and interest in students.
  
• Second, a deep commitment to the belief that every student is capable of academic success.
  
• Third, a focus on driving measurable student learning outcomes.
  
• Finally, essential personal attributes—such as a willingness to make teaching practice public and to constantly learn and improve—on top of a capacity for teamwork, leadership, and cultural competency.
  

More specifically, highly effective principals look for teachers who are a good fit for the school's particular culture and instructional approach. Even as early as the hiring process, they are looking for teachers who exhibit potential to develop into future leaders.

Recruiting the Right Candidates

With these criteria, finding teachers who are a perfect fit may seem like a herculean task. Terrence Carter, a New Leaders principal at Clara Barton Elementary School in Chicago, remarks, “It is literally like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Clara Barton is a traditional district school, but Carter extends his recruiting network far beyond the district pool. He maintains close ties with local alternative certification programs that require yearlong residencies and produce candidates who, he says, have been well trained to diagnose and address students' needs. Other highly effective principals rely on recommendations from other school leaders, and they extend their recruiting networks to other districts, especially those that focus on teacher development.

Highly effective principals also make a point of recruiting year-round, whether they currently have openings or not. Even in rapidly improving schools, teacher turnover in urban districts often remains high, and hiring is further complicated by sometimes inefficient district practices. Therefore, it is imperative for principals to develop their own pipeline of quality candidates who demonstrate the potential to meet all of the selection criteria.

The Selection Process

After having identified potential teacher candidates, highly effective principals rigorously screen to select candidates who have the most potential to increase student learning and contribute to their school's culture. They also look for candidates who have the experience and content knowledge to fill gaps on grade-level or content-area teams.

Just as New Leaders for New Schools' selection process tightly aligns with our criteria for successful candidates, highly effective principals also create a strong connection between the knowledge, skills, beliefs, and orientations they hope to see in their teachers and the process they use to select them.

The selection process typically involves

• An application.
  
• Interviews with the principal and leadership teams.
  
• Demonstration lessons with teachers, students, and sometimes even parents.
  
• Opportunities for candidates to receive constructive feedback and reflect on their own learning and professional growth.
  

Where possible, candidates should demonstrate measurable student achievement growth in their prior work.

At Clara Barton, Carter also requires candidates to study his school's student achievement data and discuss how they might propel it forward. Highly effective principals and their leadership teams focus interview questions on the candidate's belief in the academic potential of every student and willingness to engage in professional learning. Alignment in these areas is considered nonnegotiable, and teacher leaders play a key role in assessing whether the candidate is a good fit for the school's culture.

After hiring, highly effective principals and their leadership teams engage new teachers in a robust induction process to orient them to the school's cultural norms. In forthcoming columns, we'll examine two essential elements of school culture for dramatically improving schools: building student aspirations for academic success and instituting a caring, learning-focused, schoolwide code of conduct.

Ben Fenton is a cofounder and chief strategy and knowledge officer for New Leaders for New Schools.