Teaching interviews are different from office interviews in one big way: the panel wants to see you teach, not only hear you talk about it. The panel is usually the head teacher, a subject head and an education officer from the ministry or the NGO that supports the school. For lecturer posts a dean sits in; for NGO education officer posts, a programme manager. All of them have taught, and they recognise a real teacher within minutes.
- Lesson planning and learning outcomes: can you say what students will be able to do by the end of the lesson, and plan the 40 minutes to get there?
- Classroom management: how you keep 50 to 80 students working with one textbook for every four of them, without shouting or a stick.
- Assessment: how you find out who understood today, not only at the end-of-term exam, and what you change when half the class did not.
- Child safeguarding and positive discipline: you know the school's code of conduct, you never use corporal punishment or humiliation, and you know who to report a concern to.
- Inclusion: how you keep girls in school, include children with disabilities and help IDP children who missed two or three years.
- Parents and the Community Education Committee (CEC): how you bring parents in before there is a problem, and how you use the CEC for attendance, fees and safety.
Language matters here more than in most jobs. Public primary schools teach in Somali, many secondary schools and universities teach in English or Arabic, and NGO education officers write reports in English. Answer the panel in the language of each question, and teach your demo lesson in the language the school actually teaches in.