How do we build a teaching team at Flow and who are we looking for?

Minor disclaimer right at the beginning — I have never searched for anyone by CV and I will never do it 🙂 Experience is nice, but for me it is a person's character and it is difficult to evaluate according to CV. It's also about mutual energy, empathy or, you might as well call it “chemistry”. It's just that the process of hiring for me always goes a little differently than the standard 🙌 And how do we do it now on Flow School? For that, allow me a couple of the following paragraphs.

When my colleagues came to me saying that we are growing and that we need to find more good teachers for our team, the first thing that came to my mind was what we can offer our future colleagues and how to make it not sound like another of the x demands on the market? This question took me back a couple of years to when I was once building my first start-up teams and the way I tried to build the ideal environment to “collect” and develop talent.

Cognitive Diversity, T-Shaped Team and Support

In Flow, the educator works in the style of T-Shaped teams he once presented Tim Brown, founder and boss IDEO and one of the pioneers of Design Thinking in the world. His idea is that a team is always better as a whole than individuals. A T-shaped team means two planes: horizontal, where we each have many competencies, experiences, (hidden) talents, hobbies, preferences, etc., and vertical, which represents our domain — what we are best at. T-shaped teams are cognitively divergent, made up of people from different disciplines who create something new and unique together each time. And that's exactly what we want to achieve at Flow — to give educators space where they are strongest and other members or colleagues will take care of the rest:

• Pedagogical team in the form of tandem teaching — for each class a main Czech teacher with didactic experience, a native speaker of English and an afternoon progressive assistant teacher.
• The support team, or professional team for educators and children, is primarily child psychologists, educational methodologists, speech therapists, etc.
• External cooperation with external experts to develop individual competencies and educational fields, which will connect information with the real world.

Three basic desires, why we go to work

And it's not money! At least not primarily 😅 On the other hand, and from experience, I know that there are three desires that each of us has that we need to fulfill in order to feel good at work:

• The desire for a really big vision and the feeling of being part of something far greater than I could ever have imagined. A feeling and a clear plan that we are going to build something wonderful and that we can make a significant contribution to that.
• Belonging and that basic desire to belong to a team that I can lean on and that will support me at all times. A team I can trust boundlessly and they trust me. This desire also includes a sense of self-confidence, psychological well-being and mutual support.
• Continuous development and the possibility of personal and professional growth. I see this as the key to maintaining a long-term employer-employee relationship. Times are constantly changing and the demands on employees are becoming greater - who else will give them room to grow if not the employer?

And then there is the money already mentioned, if you want a salary. Yes, it is very important, we will give it and it will be above standard 😊 I just do not believe that you can keep a capable person with money in the long term 🙌

So who are we actually looking for?

Now that you know how we build teams at Flow School, let's take a look at who we're looking for. I don't want to make a big science out of it, and again I'll sum it up in a few basic points:

• A person with a great love for children, who sees possibilities in children and wants to give them space for their uniqueness, without prejudices and assumptions 🧡
• Someone who is not afraid to do things differently. Yes, we are in elementary school and we shouldn't be experimenting so much. But we need people with an open mind and a willingness to change the status quo 🤝
• Educator with strong didactics for the first grade of primary school. We need teachers who will monitor how well our children are doing. Without strong didactics we do not want to do this 🤗

And that's it, my friends. It's not rocket science. We go about it with sincerity and look for those to whom this way of cooperation makes sense. If you know of any, please let me know at marv@skolaflow.czor drop me a message here at LinkedIn. Thank you! 🙏

You can find more about Flow School at www.skolaflow.cz.

Love, Marv & Team Flow 🧡

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