Faith Islam Academy, Ohio: School Must First be Known - Essay Example

Part A In order to provide a context for analyzing the selection process currently in use in Faith Islam Academy, Ohio, an analysis of important information about the school must first be known. This information was extracted from the interviews I conducted with some staff members. The school serves a diverse student population from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Some students have achieved tuition scholarship from the state. An online learning management system, Engrade, helps teachers and parents to monitor students’ achievements and progress regularly. It also updates homework and generates report cards. Up till Grade 2, the grading scale is skill based but, letter grades are assigned from Grade 3 up to Grade 8. ESL classes are provided to second language learners. Summer tutoring is also available on demand. Low-income students are provided certain benefits. The local school board, Faith Islamic Academy’s Board of Education (FIA-BOE) has played an important role in student achievement by setting long-term goals and designing accurate curriculum. The school district provides a little funding that is spent on computer laboratories, technological resources and management systems; however, the main revenue for budget arises from the tuition fees. The district helps design discipline management and policies handbooks along with parent-student and staff handbooks. The Parent-Student Handbook describes the schools’ mission statement and vision, and provides information about admissions, tuition fees, general information, discipline and code of conduct, student well-being services, and communication channels. The Staff Handbook provides staff members with information related to their employment at FIA and describes essential FIA policies. The school tries to support all gifted students. It gives equal opportunities to students of every faith, race, color, religion, sex, gender, nation, ancestry, citizenship status, pregnancy, physical disability, mental disability, age, military status, marital status, registered domestic partner status, and medical condition. There are many community services like ex-fundraising for health children. Faith Islamic Academy makes sure that the students are fully encouraged to be self-reliant and self-disciplined in the journey of learning. With the information outlined above in mind, I engaged the principal in an interview to seek information on how its current teacher selection process was run in selecting teachers for school. Based on the interview, I analyzed that the teacher selection process did not well align with the school’s goals, policies, needs and resources. This is because school’s vision which demanded that there should be a well-defined and sophisticated teacher selection process was not in place. Such sophisticated process was to ensure that proficient and competent teachers were hired to help the principal and the Board to handle the educational and curriculum challenges effectively. The recruiting, screening and hiring processes should be efficiently conducted since the current selection process did not give adequate timeline, funding and resources for all the steps of the process. I also observed that the teachers were not trained enough to cope with the technological devices and equipment, and hence, teacher training in this regard was also required. The new selection process is therefore required to ensure that candidates have enough technological training or expertise that should enable them to inculcate technology in the lesson plans. Based on the identified weaknesses, the paper was prepared to focus on ways of devising a new teacher selection process keeping in view the discrepancies in the existing process in Faith Islam Academy, Ohio. The Faith Islamic Academy is an active full-time Islamic school in Northeast Ohio, located at the Islamic Community Center in Cuyahoga Falls. The school has been in operation since 2002. Currently, the school serves pre-school through 8th grade. From the various interviews conducted with the principal and the school personnel, it is revealed that there are multiple challenges that need to be addressed in order to facilitate an efficient teacher selection process. The new process should be able to culminate in the selection of a highly-qualified teacher who possesses skills and competencies necessary to bring about effective student learning and school improvement. The paper introduces an analysis of the current principal’s interview along with other related school data. The last half of the paper is dedicated to the design of the new teacher selection process. Hence, the main concern of this paper is to outline the design of a teacher selection process that should help the authorities assign a proficient teacher to the school. First of all, it is important to describe briefly the interview conducted with the principal of the Faith Islam Academy, Ohio- Ms.Fauzia Nazir . She taught math for 2 years at the Faith Academy School for first grade, and then was made principal in the same school, a position she has held for 6 years now. She also has experience working in Kashmier School in India for 4 years. She has a Master’s degree in childhood education. Ms. Fauzi when asked about the current teacher selection process, took me on the building tour. She informed me that in the beginning of March the process started with publishing job advertisement in the Akron Becon Journal, the Ohio.com Journal and on the Faith Islam Academy website. The job was also announced in the Islamic Center after Jummah prayer. After four weeks, FIA-BOE along with the principal acted as a committee which, defined and established policies and procedures for the teacher selection process. The principal and FIA-BOE (five members) screened and selected 10-12 candidates for interviews after screening their resumes stored in electronic folders. The candidates were, then invited by Mr.Fauzi through a phone call for interviews. After the interview, the finalist and semi-finalist who were 2 to 3 candidates were selected for further interviews and the final discussion to ask them to do lesson plan in class setting to see their ability for class room management and for other skills. Read More