Interview Questions for High School CS Teacher Positions

I know schools and teachers are starting to plan for next year and many of us are interviewing. I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day who was preparing for an interview and it got me thinking... Maybe we could crowd-source some standard (and challenging questions that we wish were standard) questions for High School CS Teacher Interviews. It could help those preparing for interviews and might help us to reflect on our own practices this year too.

Here are a few that came to my mind:

  1. How do you recruit students for your CS classes? 
  2. How do you define diversity in CS? How do you help all students to feel included and supported in your classrooms?
  3. Are you concerned about coding plagiarism? What do you do to help students to honestly complete their coding assignments?
  4. Which coding language and IDE do you think is best for introductory students? Why?
  5. Describe a time you helped students debug their code. What was the problem? How did they fix it? What did they learn from the experience that they can apply moving forward?
  6. Do you think everyone should take computer science classes in high school? Why or why not? Which ones?
  7. What are your favorite student-facing online resources?
  8. How do you keep learning about CS Education?
  9. How has your teaching style changed during the pandemic? Have you learned anything that you can now apply when you return to full-time face to face learning?



Profile picture for user alvin.burns@emeryusd.org
Submitted by alvin burns on Tue, 05/25/2021 - 6:42 pm EDT

An important questions for urban school teachers:

How do work with struggling readers

How do work with (EL) Students

What do you do with students who are enrolled in your class and already know how to code in the Language you're teaching

What your approach to equity in the classroom, especially when it comes to equity in student learning/curriculum. 

If there are more boys than girls in your CS program, what do you do to recruite move girls and if the disparity is with inclusion of student of color, how to you approach diversifiying your CS students.

In reply to by alvin burns


Profile picture for user Rclang1
Submitted by Rebekah Lang on Wed, 05/26/2021 - 6:57 pm EDT

Having worked in urban, rural and suburban districts, I think these are great questions for any and all schools! Thanks for adding them. :)

In reply to by alvin burns


Profile picture for user Rclang1
Submitted by Rebekah Lang on Wed, 05/26/2021 - 6:59 pm EDT

I just had another thought: it could be helpful to be ready for questions about hardware. What is your ideal classroom setup and tech? How have you funded additional resources before (grants, etc.)? Have you worked with students who have broken equipment? How have you handled it?