Determining effective teaching behaviors through the hiring process

Purpose – One bad hiring decision can lead to low student achievement. Research supports that teachers are the most influential factor in student success. As a result, principals’ current practice of hiring teachers based on intuition and likeability must change. Given the current high stakes era, principals need reassurance that the teachers they hire can indeed meet the needs of the students and the goals of the school. The purpose of this paper is to determine which interview protocol questions would predict high levels of effective teaching behaviors exhibited by teachers in the classroom. Design/methodology/approach – A convenience sample of 600 working teachers responded to a 93-item Likert-scale online questionnaire related to the four domains of effective teaching behaviors: classroom management, organizing instruction, implementing instruction, and monitoring progress and potential. The researchers first analyzed the teacher responses to assess their reliability and validity. A regression analysi...