do the job in the interview

When an individual is interviewing for a new job, the word on the street is that this is the opportunity to do the work involved with the position. Rather than play the game of interviewing, it has been suggested that the candidate reinvent the intervirew by using the setting as the first day of work. After identifying a challenge associated with the position, the candidate then shows how s/he would take this on — not by talking about it but by beginning to actually do so. For example, instead of talking about how to re-design a doctoral program (assuming this is part of the new position) the redesign process begins during the interview.

We applied similar logic during applicant interviews for our graduate teacher education program. I was interviewing potential science teachers and I'm expected to invent a "content" question. Because it looks as if I'll be teaching the science methods course to these students this summer, I realized this was my opportunity to foreshadow the content of that course. Further, since the achievement gap data is so fascinating, I thought it would be revealing to ask the teacher applicants to engage in the work they will be doing in July.
We gave them some of the data from NAEP and invited them to comment upon what they made of this information. They were also asked to describe the possible implications for the classroom science teacher. At the very least, it made for interesting conversation and it was entertaining for me to watch them work to make sense of the material even as they attended to the comments being made by the one or two other applicants who were also at the table.

No, we didn't solve the problem of the achievement gap. But YES, we did learn a great deal about the applicants by how they wrestled with the issues. For one, we found out that some people are too caught up in their own lives (and the schooling experiences of their children) to take into consideration the wider population of school-aged children. Others revealed that they had already puzzled over similar data and those discrepancies were part of the reason they were leaving laboratory science to engage in science teaching. Was this a brilliant move to ask this kind of question: maybe. One reservation about claiming brilliance is that it has taken many years of being unfulfilled by the interview process for teacher applicants to FINALLY stumble across this approach. The tragedy is that this became the first time I felt as if we were asking our applicants to do the job during the interview.