We will be hiring teachers for our school. How are we going to do that?
As we have said before, we are going to start out with the Junior Level and grow upwards and down from there. What is the Junior Level ? Well, in Leonard’s Democratic School, in Leonard’s State School Clubhouse Democracy and in his Class 2 area at Summerhill, the Junior Level is the 9+ to 13 age range. This is a particular developmental stage, the Project Stage, the Veteran Child Stage. You can look back at our Age Range and Clubhouse Democracy theme weeks to see more specifics; why we would start a school with this age group.
So this means that from the start we will need Junior Teachers. However, we will also have to think about democratic school teacher qualifications in general. We need to sort this out so that we can write a decent job description, craft an advert and application form that will attract the right people and be able to interview them properly.
All of this is going to take some time to go through, so for the first of this little series we are going to talk about what is called in business jargon “the person specification.”
Here are some of the questions we will be addressing in this week’s podcast:
Will experience of democratic education be essential?
Will a formal teaching qualification and experience be necessary?
What weight do we put on teaching vs community presence? We don’t want to turn it into any old school but we do not want to attract wasters and incompetents either.
What are the qualities that we are definitely not looking for? Are there some red flags that will tell us the person is not appropriate.
Be sure to listen in !
