How to Teach a Demo Lesson for a Private School Interview

A demo lesson — also called a sample lesson, a teaching demonstration or a model lesson — is a short lesson you teach while the people who would hire you watch.

It is a working interview: the committee wants to see you teach, not hear you describe teaching.

The audience shifts with the school.

You might find the head of school, a division head, a department chair, teachers from the department you would join, or a combination of them in the room.

Whether real students sit in on the lesson is the biggest planning variable, and it changes how you prepare.

The scenarios — your own class, an unfamiliar class, and the committee-only room — are covered under teaching real students vs teaching adults below.

Any role that puts you in front of students can come with one: subject teacher, special educator, teaching assistant moving into lead teaching, substitute or teaching fellow.

Placement guidance is explicit about subject preparation.

Carney Sandoe & Associates, a national independent-school placement firm, advises new-graduate candidates that independent schools require a degree in the subject they wish to teach — minors and concentrations may be acceptable — plus experience working with children.

The demonstration is where that experience with students gets shown rather than claimed, which is why the preparation questions below matter as much as the teaching itself.

If you are still mapping the sector itself, the private school teacher career guide covers the role, the school types that hire it and how a search fits together.

Mind the calendar too.

Carney Sandoe describes the independent school hiring season as beginning around January, with the bulk of its work with candidates taking place January through May.

If you are interviewing on that calendar, build your demonstration preparation into the spring rather than leaving it to the week of the visit.

Whoever coordinates the visit should hand you the basics.

The rest you get by asking, and the answers decide whether your plan fits the room it will actually run in.

Get answers to these before you build anything:

• The logistics. Grade level, subject, the exact length of the slot, and how many students will be in the room.
• The students. What the class has covered recently, where your slot sits inside their current unit, and how the school describes its learning support, so your plan meets the real group.
• The room. What technology and materials are available, whether you may bring your own, and what a sensible backup looks like if the projector will not cooperate.
• The observers. Who will be in the room and in what roles, so you know who is evaluating and who is there to watch.
• The format. Real students, a committee-only room, or something else — and whether you choose the topic or the school assigns it.
• The topic. If the school assigns one, ask for the unit it sits inside and what the students have already done with it. If you choose, ask what the class is working on now, so your slot connects to something they know.
• What comes after. Whether a debrief or feedback conversation follows the lesson, and whether the observers count that conversation as part of the evaluation.

One item is easy to skip and worth asking outright: whether the school will share the criteria its observers use.

The answer tells you how to aim the lesson, and asking it signals that you think about instruction in exactly those terms.

Close the loop in writing.

A short email that restates the topic, the length, the grade and the group size protects you if the plan shifts between the phone call and the visit.

Whatever length you are given, teach one complete arc rather than a fragment of a full period.

A slot that short holds one arc — name the objective, teach the concept, put students to work on it, and land the close — and the steps below break that arc into six moves.

Plan for less time than you are given, and mark one cut you can make live if the room needs it.

Bring a no-technology version of anything you would otherwise project, plus printed copies of whatever students need in their hands.

Toward the lower end of the 20–45 minute range, compress the student-work stretch rather than dropping the close; a lesson that ends without its close gives the observers nothing to judge learning against.

Ask early which room you are walking into, because each setup is a different assignment.

Your own class.

If a school offers to observe you teaching your current students, keep your routines and teach your real material.

The observers came to see whether your everyday teaching holds up, not a performance built for them.

An unfamiliar class.

When the school assembles a group for your visit, learn names fast, set your expectations for the room early, and plan tasks that let you circulate.

Bring a first activity that works with no warm-up, because you will not have the rapport a regular class takes for granted.

The committee itself.

With no students present, teach the adults as if they were the class.

Keep them doing things — reading, solving, discussing — instead of presenting at them, and narrate the moves you would make with real students: with a class, this is the point where I would have pairs compare answers.

Conferences compress the whole thing.

Candidates who work with a placement firm may do their interviewing at an event rather than on campus: Carney Sandoe runs in-person hiring conferences where candidates interview with independent schools.

With Carney Sandoe, that route costs you nothing as a candidate — its placement services are free for candidates, because the hiring schools are its clients and pay any fees.

If a demonstration lands on a conference schedule, ask each school beforehand what the slot will look like, what the room contains and what you may bring.

There is no rearranging a plan that assumed the wrong room once your travel is booked.

Listen for one variation when you ask about format: a lesson followed by a structured feedback conversation, where you discuss the choices you made with the observers.

If a school describes its process that way, prepare the debrief as seriously as the lesson itself, because the conversation is part of the demonstration.

Schools weigh their own priorities, which is why the criteria question under what to ask the school is worth asking outright.

What follows are the dimensions a live lesson is built to surface, so plan yours to produce evidence on each.

• Clarity of purpose. Can the observers state what students were learning, and can the students?
• Student thinking. Did students read, write, solve and argue, or did they watch you work?
• Questioning and response. What did you ask, how did you handle an answer that went sideways, and did you build on what students offered?
• Presence and routines. Did the room settle with you, and did your transitions hold without friction?
• Command of the subject. Did you handle the content accurately, including the turns you did not script?
• Closure. Did the lesson end with evidence about whether students learned it?

Treat the observers as colleagues watching for learning, not an audience scoring a performance.

Polish matters less than whether students think in your room.

Do not over-script the segment.

A lesson that only works if nothing surprises you collapses the first time a student goes off the expected path, while a plan with one honest cut point absorbs the surprise.

Whatever the form, a strong demonstration produces artifacts the committee can discuss afterwards: the objective students can restate, the work they produced, and the close that ties the two together.

Take the topic from the school wherever the school will give it — the unit the class is in, the course you would actually teach.

When the choice falls to you, pick something you can teach deeply in one arc rather than something impressive but thin.

By level:

• Lower and elementary grades. A read-aloud with turn-and-talk, a hands-on math task with manipulatives, or a shared-writing segment. Keep transitions tight and make your routines visible, because with this age group, how you run the room is as much a part of the lesson as the content.
• Middle grades. A short debate, a claim-evidence-reasoning warm-up, a lab-style investigation with a quick written product, or a vocabulary routine attached to a text. Lean into the argument; contestable content gives students this age something to take a position on.
• Upper grades. A close reading of a short primary source or poem, a seminar with a discussion protocol, a problem-building sequence in math, or a data set students interpret in pairs. Show that you can lead a discussion without dominating it.

By subject:

• English and humanities. Choose a text short enough to read inside the slot and rich enough to argue about. Model one interpretive move, then have students try it on the text themselves.
• Math. Build a concept rather than reviewing a procedure. Let students represent the mathematics — number lines, diagrams, estimates — before you formalize it.
• Science. Anchor in a phenomenon or a quick demonstration, collect one piece of evidence from every student, and reason from it together.
• History and social studies. Two short documents that complicate each other beat one long summary. Teach sourcing and corroboration, and let students do the comparing.
• World and classical languages. Stay in the target language at a level students can follow, and make comprehension checks visible. For a classical school, a short Latin or Greek reading with guided translation carries the same arc.
• Special education and learning support roles. Build one explicit scaffold into the task — a graphic organizer, sentence starters, a worked example — and be ready to explain why it is there during the debrief.

Two settings need a small adjustment to the plan.

At Catholic, Christian and Jewish day schools, be ready to connect your subject to the school's religious mission in the debrief, and treat any theology or text-study component as its own lesson to prepare rather than an add-on.

At Montessori, Waldorf and other pedagogy-driven schools, ask how the observation itself is structured before you plan.

The school can tell you what its observers expect to see, and preparing for the wrong format is an avoidable loss.

Ask whether a debrief follows the lesson, and treat it — when there is one — as part of the lesson rather than a cooldown.

Prepare an honest answer before you leave the room: how do you think that went?

Name one thing that worked with reference to student learning, one thing you would change, and what you would do differently next time.

Match your self-assessment to what actually happened, because the observers watched the same lesson you did and the honest reading is the credible one.

If a segment went badly, say what you would redo without reaching for excuses.

The debrief demonstrates that you can analyze and adjust — the same skill you are asking the school to believe you will use with students every day.

After the visit, send a short note that thanks the committee and references the lesson itself rather than generic appreciation.

Keep your materials; the same planning template is your starting point for the next school, and each demonstration you teach makes the next one cheaper to prepare.

From there the process is out of your hands — references, a second visit, the offer.

What stays with you is the demonstration itself: a reusable proof, school after school, of what you look like in front of students.