Welcome to our 24 new teachers! #Engage109

“An organization’s values are its life’s blood.”
– Max DePree

Each year we welcome new teachers into our school family. We share our mission, vision, values, we take them on a tour of the District and the communities we serve and we welcome them into our hearts and 20150129-215415.jpgminds. In DPS109 we have been welcoming quite a few teachers over the past few years, nearly 60 in three years! This year we open our Little Red Schoolhouse and implement a refined and reinvigorated mentor and induction program.

New teachers in DPS109 are selected as part of a rigorous and evidenced based system. I’ve written about this in greater detail before, and here is an excerpt:

Our search for excellence is a regular part of our work. Our high expectations for and of excellence permeate all of our work. Our structured selection instruments/interviews allow us to manage the thousands of active applications in our job application database roias we screen in the applicants with the highest predictive validity metrics. While we search for excellence, we have science to back up the work. With fidelity to our process, with structured selection as well as resume review, essay review and fit interviews with input teams, we can predict, with up to 88% (.88) certainty that our chosen candidate will be excellent in the particular role.

The structured interview helps increase this validity by between .23 and .50 … without scientifically based interview instruments, traditional unstructured selection yields about a 30% (.30) predictive validity.

The slides below were shared with our new teachers today and they represent the hopes and desires we have for our talented new teachers – as well as all teachers and staff.


Welcome new teachers! DPS109 – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

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