Hiring Effective Teachers

3D Group helps school districts use highly valid predictive methods to screen for the best teachers available. We provide districts customized tools based on strong research about what makes effective teachers and we train district staff on how to use the tools to make the best hiring decisions possible. Not only do we provide the tools for hiring better teachers, we also validate these hiring tools by correlating actual teacher performance with performance on the tools so there is solid evidence to support the validity of hiring decisions.

Consider the following scenario:

Imagine you are the HR manager of a school district and three weeks before the Fall semester a 7th grade pre-algebra teacher informs you that she has accepted a position elsewhere. Of course, this is very inappropriate, unprofessional and inconvenient. You need to fill this position quickly and after searching around for a bit and advertising the opening you manage to get three applicants for the opening. Based on a quick review of their resumes, Applicant One has only taught high school students in calculus, chemistry and geometry; Applicant Two has been teaching basic math to 6th and 7th grade students at a nearby middle school in the same district; and Applicant Three has never taught in the schools but has been a trainer in programming languages for several nearby companies, and has an advanced degree in math. The principal has spent an hour talking with each candidate. She was impressed most by the third candidate who was clearly very professional but also friendly and enthusiastic and the second candidate who seemed very familiar with the age group and seemed like he would fit right into the school. The first candidate seemed a bit introverted, nervous and overly eager for the job. Who do you hire?

Of course, none of these candidates are the perfect choice and yet, this kind of choice is faced every year by school districts nationwide. The odds of making the right choice based on the available information is about 1 in 3 (in other words, you might as well pick out of a hat). On the other hand, an HR manager with a set of validated screening tools could invest as little as 5 hours time across all 3 candidates and improve those odds dramatically. A valid interview and job simulation exercise could easily uncover that Candidate Three has no ability to organize or adjust a lesson plan, that Candidate Two doesn’t understand algebra well enough to teach it, and that Candidate One not only knows the material but also excels at handling split classrooms where some students struggle and others are bored by the same material (a common problem for Pre-Algebra).