We’re in the middle of hiring next year’s faculty. We’ve got four openings, we’ve received well over 100 resumes, and we’ve conducted at least four interviews for each position, with several more interviews to go. But we are starting to narrow down our search, and it’s my hope that It’s one of the most important and most challenging part of school administration, and perhaps one of the hardest to blog about, given the sensitive nature of the topic.

But I’m going to try to talk about some of my thought process around the whole hiring process without getting into specifics.

First… consensus is everything. We have a hiring committee at SLA that is made up of teachers, students, parents and me. There may be as many as six people around the table for an interview, and that’s really important. We rank each interviewee on a rubric that has five categories that we find important (and while I’m not going to reveal the exact rubric here, I think this entry will probably give a sense of what we value.) Consensus can be really hard, as obviously people can see things differently and value different things, but given that we all have to work with and learn with the people we choose, consensus is everything.

A word about consensus — and this probably should be a post in and of itself — consensus doesn’t always mean that everyone walks away completely agreeing with everything. It means that everyone gets to a point where they are willing to agree that the decision about to be made is the decision that best meets the needs of the group.

Second… do they understand what SLA is about? Seems obvious, but it’s not. And this is why we send every interviewee a copy of our Family Night book, so they can really get a sense of what we’re about. Everything we do up until the interview is designed to try to find applicants who want to be in our environment. But once in the interview, we ask a lot of questions designed to see if there really is a deep level of understanding of what we do.

Next… perhaps this is more traditional, but do we think they are a great teacher? There are some aspects of teaching that are universal, and we do look for those. Do we think they have energy and passion for teaching… do they have the steel in the spine necessary to deal with the hard days… do they love what they do… Some of the things we look for here might be different than other schools, some may be the same, I’m not sure.

We look for people who think deeply about teaching and learning. As I’ve written before, this means looking for people who teach, rather than "deliver instruction." But we want people who think about crafting curriculum, who think about their craft and who are always looking to improve. So much of SLA is about reflective practice by all its members, that we want — must have — teachers who reflect, who read, who challenge, who think, who dream… With so much that we learn every day, you have to come to SLA with an open mind.

Also… we look for people who want to be part of a community. We take that idea very seriously. I’ve known some amazing teachers who were brilliant behind the closed door of their classroom, but they were a nightmare in meetings. We can’t afford that at SLA. We do make decisions by consensus and we do try to pull together around many different ideas, so we need people who see themselves as part of something larger than themselves.

And we look for people who bring something special to the community. We want an exciting group of educators who really have something to offer to our students. I look forward to coming to work every day because the teachers and students of SLA challenge me and make me grow every day. We want people who can contribute to that environment. As one of our teachers said, "I want more people I can learn from." Me too.

Oh yeah… and having a sense of wanting to really push the envelope with technology is good too.