How might new teacher induction look for a teacher who didn’t student teach due to coronavirus?

In our mastermind this week, we talked about hiring teachers. A hot seat question this week was about how to recruit teachers and then support them when they haven’t had any real classroom experience.

How would you answer this question?

If you are fortunate enough to not have to hire anyone new this year, that’s great. But if you do, how are you handling this situation? Have you thought of it, yet? With all that’s going on, it’s not something I was thinking of.

Here are a few ideas.

Once that new person is hired, invite them to join some virtual classes and support this year’s teachers in synchronous zoom meetings. You probably won’t be able to pay them, yet, but it could give them some experience interacting with the kids and teachers online. Of course, they would be considered a volunteer in that situation, and their background check and all protocols would still need to be followed.

Our mentoring of teachers next year is going to need an upgrade. Start planning now what you mentoring program looks like and how it will need to change to meet the needs of someone who hasn’t even had student teaching experience?

How can you use the months we have before school starts again to get them acquainted with your school culture, norms, and policies? One thing that I have done in the past is an email series to new teachers. Ten emails that explained how we do our work at our school and what they could expect. This gave teachers a great idea of what to expect when they arrived at our island community.

The final thing to think about with these teachers with no experience is training before school starts. Typically, we all too often show new teachers their room, point out the boooks they’ll use, and wish them good luck. They need much more support than that! I would strongly suggest looking at the time you use before students arrive to make a plan for assisting your (new) teachers and helping them be successful.

We also talked about how your interview questions need to change. Right now, we don’t know if school is going to start as it usually does. What types of questions can you ask to assess someone’s skills or abilities as it relates to online instruction versus in-person instruction. The good thing is that if we are still in remote learning mode, you will at least get to see how they are on video conferencing when you interview them, as that may be their classroom.