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APPLYING TO TEACH ENGLISH - WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A GOOD INTERVIEW

APPLYING TO TEACH ENGLISH - WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A GOOD INTERVIEW

Everyone has their own style of interviewing, but there is a professional and a non-professional way of doing it and I’d like to give you some pointers here for determining whether the school you are applying to is indeed going to be the serious, supportive place you’re looking for.

Who’s doing most of the talking?
So, you go into the interview and the person interviewing you starts telling you all about the vacancies they have where the classes are, the levels of the students etc. Do you get the feeling they’re not really interested in you? Not interested in your experience, your skills, what you would bring to their school?
You’re right, they’re not. If you have an interview with this scenario then either the person interviewing you is not very experienced in EFL issues themselves, they are just concerned about getting any teacher to cover the classes they have regardless of suitability, and/or the interviewer has not managed their time properly to allocate you the time you deserve with this interview.

And by this time you’re not feeling particularly valued, right?

A well structured interview
A professional interview should focus on you first, it should give you the opportunity to talk fully about your teaching experience and aspirations. The interviewer should then use this information to see if what you have to offer is a match to what they are looking for, and depending on the extent of this match you will be given more or less information about the school and the vacancies available.

Let’s start at the beginning
What is the ideal way to start? There should be some small talk to make you feel comfortable and welcome, for example a comment about your journey to the school. This is the moment to demonstrate your social skills, a very important part of teaching. If you ask a question back to the interviewer at this early stage and establish a short, warm conversation you’ll get off to an excellent start.

The interviewer should then ask a series of open questions to get you talking. Finding out how long you intend to stay in the city for example and what your short and medium term plans is a familiar and easy topic to warm up on.

Let me now go through the type of questions I tend to ask as we get into the main body of the interview

Questions related to your TEFL course
Regardless of whether you are recently qualified or not this topic is very important to me to assess how much you got out of the course and how you are going to apply the skills to your teaching in the “real world”.

Below are examples of my questions:

• What part of the course did you find the most challenging?
• In what ways did the course differ from your expectations of it?
• What specific skills did you find most useful and which you would definitely use in your classes?
• Tell me about a practice class that worked well for you
• Tell me about a class that didn’t turn out well. What were the learning points you took from it.

Questions related to teaching in general
I then move onto teaching in general and we start to go into more depth with questions such as:

• What did you decide to go into teaching?
• What are your strengths as a teacher?
• Which areas do you still need to work on?
• With a pre-intermediate group how would you test their knowledge of the present perfect before presenting it?
• Imagine you are teaching an upper intermediate student who says they just want conversation? How would you plan for this type of class?
• What is your policy regarding error correction?
• How do you recycle language previously studied?
• How can you motivate a group of 13 year olds?

Any teacher taking TEFL seriously should be able to answer these types of questions with relative confidence. From our point of view, we are asking them because they indicate the standards we expect from our teachers, although weaker areas once discovered are then addressed though 1:1 coaching support and general teacher training workshops.

How you handle in depth questions also gives us an insight into how confident the you are and how assertive you can be, a very necessary skill when you have an intermediate student in front of you demanding to know the reason for a certain grammar point.

Moving onto details
Once the essentials of teaching are sufficiently explored, the interviewer can then move onto the details and logistics of working for the school and there will have been a sufficient enough exchange of information for you to ask relevant questions to help you decide if this is a school you would like to work for.

You may be asked to complete a grammar test, particularly if you don’t have a TEFL qualification, this is quite understandable, we don’t expect you to be an expert as you would do the necessary research before each class, but we do expect you to know the basics, like the present perfect tense for example.

Finally...
And finally, make sure you go away with everything you need to know such as the rate of pay, start dates for classes etc. and how and when you will be contacted to confirm arrangements. Integrity is fundamental. If you are let down on simple communication arrangements what else can you be let down on that is more serious?

Janice Haywood
Director Windsor Idiomas