It's astonishing that this is the second to last class of the semester. This class was designated to tie up all the concepts we learned throughout this class. Instead of doing an exam, Dr. Smirnova decided to do a mock interview. The class picked four administrators to provide questions to our fellow teacher candidates. I was asked to be one of the administrators from my group and accepted the challenge. Through this I had come up with questions based on the topic I was asked to present. The topic that I chose was the inquiry method. My main reason I chose the inquiry method is because the only way I retain information is through hands on activities. The inquiry method implements this theory in order for the students to learn. After my other fellow administrators picked which method they were focusing on; it was our duty to construct a few warm up questions and questions based on our topic. Honestly, I had a difficult time constructing a few questions to ask. All questions had to be an open ended responses and they should apply to the mock school that we are creating. While contemplating the questions I decided to construct my school through a Montessori approach. This type of school will allow students to use the inquiry method to learn new content. According to the American Montessori Society, The classroom is prepared by the teacher to encourage independence, freedom within limits, and a sense of order. The child, through individual choice, makes use of what the environment offers to develop himself, interacting with the teacher when support and/or guidance is needed (p. 1). Through my mock school, I wanted teachers to follow this attribute within their classroom. Teachers should be helping their students gain that sense of independence and free will. These are a few attributes that I considered through the interview process and building the questions. Most of the questions that I made up relate to this approach and I was interested to see what my fellow teacher candidates had to say regarding the questions. Listed below are the scenarios and questions that we came up with. Please feel free to look through them!
It was now time that we implemented the questions to the teacher candidates and see their responses. Before we started the interview process, we each had to explain a little bit about our school. Which theory we rely on the most and what type of demographics we have. One by one we gave a short presentation on what we expect out of the following teacher candidates. After we introduced ourselves, we started off in our groups from Bishop Dunn. One of the first questions I asked was, "I know that you have been in Dr. Smirnova’s class, where she used the principles of Flipped classroom. How and will you use flipped teaching/ learning in your social studies classroom?" Some fellow teacher candidates were unaware of this terminology and were confused by the question. Other fellow teacher candidates came up with good answers based off of what they do know. One answer in particular caught my eye was the jigsaw method. The teacher candidates explained why this would be a good method and how they would implement it within their classroom setting. When each group was done answering this warm up questions they were then asked to pick out of the bag and read the number off the paper that they picked. I did it this way because I wanted to make it fair for everyone
in the group. Everyone in the group had different questions and they all had different answers. All of the groups used academic language that was needed for this interview and they made excellent eye contact. The one suggestion I had for the entire classroom was not use the tool Voki for all the inquiry lessons. This tool is just there to engage the students in the beginning of the section. There are other tools such as: web quests, experiments, etc. All of the administrators went to each group and presented their questions to each potential teacher candidate. Once we were all finished with each group we were asked to go out in the hallway and discuss who we would like to hire from each group and why. This discussion was in depth and long because there were a lot of great answers. We eventually made a decision and discussed some findings that we had throughout the whole classroom. As a group, we gave them suggestions and some likes from certain individuals to all teacher candidates. Through this time we not only reflected upon everyone, but we also reflected upon the concepts that we learned throughout the semester. This was an excellent way to retain all the information we learned and bring it out in a "real-life" situation. Doing this interview was a great way to end the second to last day and it also gave us tips on how to run an interview. I am looking forward to using these techniques on an actual interview. Until next time bloggers :)
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