Behavioral Interviews

In an article for School Administrator magazine, Lucy Steiner and Sharon Kebschull Barrett examine how understanding competencies—habits of behavior and underlying motivations, which can help predict how newly hired employees will do their jobs—can help administrators, such as those in Minneapolis, hire the leaders they need to turn around even the most troubled schools.

This toolkit from Public Impact is designed to help district officials identify and hire teachers who have the capacity and will to implement school turnarounds. This resource clarifies the critical competencies—habits of behavior and underlying motivations—that enable people to be successful in attempts to transform schools from failure to excellence quickly.

Designed around the job models of an Opportunity Culture, this toolkit includes job descriptions, behavioral competencies, and companion tools to select, evaluate, and develop teachers and staff.

This book by Signe and Lyle Spencer summarizes several decades of experience using the Behavior Event Interview method for selecting job candidates who are more likely to succeed in a particular role, based on the research of David McClelland, a pioneer in competency research and testing. The book includes a competency dictionary with scoring criteria for the competencies that predict superior performance in many jobs, including teaching.