My email and phone messages were never personally answered; I had to wait to receive a generic email that answered my questions, which I took to mean that many other applicants were just as confused about the process as I was.
The interview event began with two short testimonials given by recent hires. The second woman who spoke was a former architect who had a professional, warm, and down-to-earth demeanor. The first woman to speak, however, seemed to be just out of college, inarticulate, and ended all her sentences with a question mark? Ya know? Ugh. Made me wonder exactly what sort of qualities they were looking for in the applicants, and what sort of colleagues I might have if I were hired.
The interview itself consisted of about 8 applicants in one room with two facilitators. (There were 50 applicants total there that day, and we were all assigned to different rooms.) We each had to teach a 5-minute lesson while the facilitators typed furiously on their laptops. Next, we were asked to write a letter to our principal in response to a situation: It doesn't look like your students are going to pass the state standardized test, so tell your principal what you will do to ensure that all of them catch up within the next two or three months in order for them to achieve acceptable scores. Finally, we were asked to have a group discussion about essentially the same issue: failing test scores and how to get the students to succeed. More furious typing.
The individual interview was ridiculous. It was not a conversation, but more of an interrogation. The interviewer, an inexperienced public school teacher (I think she'd been teaching less than 5 years), presented me with various hypothetical situations and asked how I would respond: A girl in your class is constantly late to school and misses Reading every morning, so she's behind. She lives down the block. What would you do? Another student has an outburst in class, shouting in front of everyone that he hates the class. What would you do? You send a student to the principal for behavior issues and the principal brings the student back to your classroom, announcing in front of the other students that you have to handle your own discipline issues or it'll cost you your job. What would you do? Whenever I asked for clarification (Does the student who hates class have any learning disabilities? Was it the first time I had sent a student to the principal? Does the girl who misses Reading class have a stable home life?), the interviewer acted annoyed and curtly told me that there's no other information - what would you do? All the while, she couldn't even look at me because she was so busy typing at her laptop. She said she wanted to capture my answers verbatim. Why don't they just use A/V equipment to record the interview and give you a chance to present yourself in normal human communication mode? After two or three of these inane questions, I struggled to keep from rolling my eyes, and I'm pretty sure the interviewer noticed I was exasperated.
To prove my language skills, I also had to write a letter to parents in Spanish about the upcoming school-year curriculum.
In order to interview, you must show proof of registration and payment for a nationally standardized licensing test, which costs $120. If you don't get the job, and consequently do not have to take the test, you don't get your money back. Nice.
