Randy Lee Says Good Saturday

I was glad we went through the steps involved in hiring someone, I have run several businesses and have had to hire many people but I have never taken the number of steps that Dr. Closen suggested today. I usually just posted an ad, again not really thinking much about what the post said other than to keep the info somewhat to a minimum due to costs, then had interviews having them fill out an application. Every once in a while I did a follow up interview, but usually I went on experience, the results from their background checks, references, their persona and finally just gut feeling. Dr. Closen mentioned he had a spreadsheet set up while being an administrator which alerted him to upcoming openings and he would start the search process sometimes upwards of 2 years before the opening presented itself. I think given today's hiring climate will require us to be just as proactive. In certain geographic areas of Iowa you will be hardpressed to find people who want to work in that district given its limited social sites, night life, etc...so to get quality people you need to start the search early and use every available network contact you have.
Tying in with that, looking at the article, the key piece to the puzzle is getting those quality teachers into your district and you can do that through networking. As Joe mentioned in his blog, we have a staff that is fairly common here in rural Iowa I believe; a majority of the teachers are older and are on the verge of retirement and then we are bringing in new younger teachers to replace those individuals so the demographics of our school is slowly changing. Along with this demographic change is coming changes in teaching styles and methods. It is tough to get old dogs to learn new tricks but I am seeing some small evidence supporting the article from our math department. As Joe said, there are two people who rarely ever use technology and yet now they are at least experimenting with it. Now whether the results are going to be seen in the student's test scores is yet to be seen but if the article has any validity to it, we should.