What improvements in the classroom have you made with teachers?
The interviewer wants to see your resourcefulness and your creativity. Think about a single improvement you have made in the classroom with teachers. Explain the problem using positive language without demeaning students, teachers, or parents. Delve into how you interacted with the teacher.
Talk about how you delegated the work to staff members and what specific pieces of the puzzle you handled yourself. Finally, wrap it up by highlighting the positive outcome you achieved and its impact on the school's success.
"This year, my primary focus was adding more technology to the classroom. This generation must become accustomed to working on laptops, smart boards, and using board-approved applications."
"I recently worked with teachers to improve the classroom evaluation process. We have streamlined it and found a way to engage students in the process."
"I introduced a communication application to our teachers, parents, and student body this year. It's called ClassDojo, and it allows for posting, messaging, and easy communication between all parties. Parents now have real-time insights into what we do in the classroom daily."
Community answers are written by other candidates practicing this set. Reading how others frame the same question is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your own.
Anonymous Answer
Being a mentor teacher, I have worked with many inexperienced teachers. I take pride in my organizational skills and helping new teachers organize their rooms with the layout of their boards, and school policies and procedures have helped teachers with their classroom management.
Cindy's Feedback
Good example. Any tangible outcomes or specific examples you can discuss?
Anonymous Answer
Throughout my four years as a teacher here, I have made lots of improvements within the classroom with the help of other teachers. Firstly, I introduced the Write a Book competition while I was a 3rd class teacher and I intend to reintroduce it when restrictions ease and schools can continue to collaborate with one another. The write a book is a literacy competition that focuses on writing in a fun and engaging way. As a student, I participated in the competition and it contributed massively to my love of writing. Winning the competition gave me a great confidence boost and I wanted to share it with my students. I also focused a lot on maths last year and I introduced maths teams. I separated the class into four groups; build it, explain it, draw it and work it out-groups. The children worked at a station for a week before rotating and it improved relationships, problem-solving, and teamwork skills. A lot of what I focused on last year wasn't an option this year so I had to improvise and move to technology. Throughout lockdown, I worked closely with other teachers to share ideas and insights.
Stephanie's Feedback
This is a very thoughtful and well-rounded response! It is evident that you have used collaboration and innovation, coupled with your passion for teaching, to truly improve outcomes for students. I am sure your work has made a lasting difference in the lives of many.
Anonymous Answer
In the past, I added class dojo at the elementary level to help increase parent engagement. I worked with teachers at Head Start last year to help them use class dojo to its fullest. I spent time on the policy council for Head Start helping to improve their classrooms and program.
Stephanie's Feedback
These sound like solid improvements, but I suggest quantifying your response, if possible, to strengthen impact. For example, "I added class dojo at the elementary level and as a result, we experienced a 25% increase in parent engagement."
Anonymous Answer
I have introduced a strategy to track the interventions for more able students. Following a data drop, I identified the under-performing students across 6 subjects in KS4. I then created a spreadsheet that allowed us to specify the interventions being used. Having a central record of strategies allowed teachers to see what was working elsewhere.
Stephanie's Feedback
This sounds like an interesting system that you created. In order to make your response even stronger, I suggest adding an additional sentence to show how you worked with the teachers on understanding this data and using it to inform stronger outcomes.
Anonymous Answer
I worked with the Algebra team to use data from previous assessments to develop strategies to increase student achievement. We examined each exam question to find student misconceptions and developed strategies to overcome those misconceptions. For instance, we found that most misconceptions were vocabulary related, so we decided to start having weekly vocabulary quizzes. We would meet weekly to discuss the results of the vocabulary quizzes and adjust the plan.
Marcie's Feedback
Nice! It's great that you collaborated with others to make a data-based decision that helped out students. What role were you in when you did this? What motivated you and the algebra team to do this? What was the final result? Did the kids improve in vocabulary? Giving some additional details will further strengthen your response. Otherwise, excellent job!
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