Dissertation writing help on Screening Teacher Candidates

Custom Dissertation Writing Service - identifying characteristics of highly qualified teachers

This study was an attempt to gain an understanding of what strategies and tools elementary school administrators in Wisconsin use to screen teacher candidates during the hiring process. The results were analyzed to evaluate the extent to which administrators are screening for characteristics of candidates that predict success in the classroom. It is the researchers hope that the results of this study will provide direction for administrators that are hiring teachers while also providing data for principalship certification programs.

The task of hiring a teacher will be a daunting endeavor that starts with a pool of applications and ends with a single successful candidate. The journey in between lacks specificity and is often ambiguous and non-objective. There are a wide range of strategies being used to narrow the pool of applications to a final few from which the successful candidate will be hired. But how will a principal be confident that he or she has chosen the best candidates from which a final candidate will be chosen? This study examines what practices are being used in Wisconsin to screen teacher applications and attempts to evaluate the extent to which these strategies screen for characteristics of quality teachers as determined by research.

Research questions:

What strategies do school districts in Wisconsin use to screen elementary teacher candidates? How effective are these strategies at identifying characteristics of highly qualified teachers?

This study draws on literature in the following areas: Impact of teacher quality on student learning, characteristics of quality teachers, policies impacting teacher hiring, and research on strategies used in screening candidates. The literature indicates that there are three main goals of the hiring process: recruiting top candidates, having an efficient process, and hiring the most effective candidate. What seems to be missing is the link between an efficient hiring process and the identification of the most effective candidates during the screening process.

The study is a qualitative research project with a majority of the data being collected via interviews. Combinations of semi-structured and cognitive interviews were conducted. Each participant answered specific questions regarding their experiences with screening teacher candidates. They then were asked to screen eight sample resumes and cover letters. The think aloud protocol was used to allow the researcher the opportunity to analyze their screening practices while comparing those results with the prior statements from the semi-structured interview questions.

The sample for this study included elementary principals from three medium-sized school districts in Wisconsin. Student enrollment was the first criteria examined when determining the potential participants in the study. Principals interviewed worked in schools in the top quartile of districts in the state according to student enrollment, excluding the ten largest school districts in Wisconsin. Another of the criteria for being included in the study was that district must have multiple elementary school principals in order to capture district and school level influences on teacher screening.

The results indicate that there is much work to be done in the area of screening teacher candidates. The principals interviewed for this study had minimal training on how to screen teacher candidates. Each of the six administrators developed their own system for screening candidates with little or no direction for their school district. In addition, the findings indicate a lack consistency in how teacher candidates are screened even within a given district. In general, principals understand the importance of the hiring process yet have little training and guidance in how to effectively screen teacher candidate files for those that are highly qualified.