Should Candidates Teach a Demo Lesson? Here's My Take
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder shares his perspective on whether schools should require teaching demonstrations as part of the hiring process.
Key Takeaways
- Demo lessons have value - Seeing a candidate actually teach provides information that interviews alone can't
- But context matters - A demo lesson in an unfamiliar classroom with unknown students has significant limitations
- Use it as one data point - Demo lessons should complement, not replace, thorough interviews and reference checks
Transcript
Is it a good idea to require teaching candidates to teach a demo lesson?
This person was asking about how to approach that when school's not in session, summer school's over, and we need to hire somebody, we've done a first round, but for the second round, when they would normally do a sample lesson, what kind of activity could take the place of a sample lesson, and how could we do that authentically?
My answer to that is that you can't really do this kind of thing authentically because it's inherently inauthentic.
We're talking about a fake lesson for imaginary students for the purposes of making inferences about what kind of teacher you would be.
And we just have to recognize the limits of authenticity there, that this is a contrived situation, an artificial situation, and we're not really going to see what someone is like until after we hire them.
So I think we have to really look at this from a cost-benefit perspective.
You could do some sort of activity, some sort of simulation.
You could say, pretend we're your students.
I don't know if you've ever been on something like that, but it honestly sounds horrible to me.
And I wouldn't put that in the process for the simple reason that that it slows things down and it makes it harder for someone to accept the job once you've decided that they would be a good candidate.
And this time of year, when school is about to start, when there are very few people still looking for jobs, there are very few people even applying for jobs, if you say, now you have to teach a sample lesson, and guess what, we're your pretend students, a lot of people are gonna say, I'm not sure I want to go through with this, or they're going to go through with it, but they're not going to feel good about it.
And then they're going to feel weird about how the whole thing went.
And then it's just going to mess up your hiring process.
And I think if that person has other options, it could make the difference.
It could be what chooses them to go with another job because you gave them that weird simulation experience.
So I'm not going to say there's never room for this kind of thing, but it doesn't seem like a good move to me.
Schools are competing for talent.
That's one thing that I think administrators have to realize and teachers have to realize.
Schools are competing for talent, and that puts teachers and candidates of all types in the driver's seat when it comes to the hiring process at this time of year.
Let me know what you think.