Evaluating Teaching in the Hiring Process

By: Jeffrey L. Bernstein

During my time as a full-time faculty member, few things I did within my department were as consequential as participating in faculty hiring.  When we hire a faculty member, we are choosing somebody who will teach our students, mentor them, and set the tone for teaching and learning in our department. Very few things we do are more important than who we invite to join us on the faculty.

In the course of hiring, I have come to believe that it is not hard to assess the research potential of our prospective colleagues. We can read their articles, consider the outlets where their work appears, and read letters from dissertation advisors and committee members who know their research intimately. When it comes to teaching, however, the job is much tougher. Few external letters address teaching in a meaningful way; most letter-writers have scant bases for doing so. While candidates may share teaching philosophy statements or syllabi, there may be a gap between what they write on paper and what they do in the classroom. Even viewing their teaching directly provides an incomplete picture (see below). We can make educated judgments, which are often correct, but it is an open question how effective we are at this.

In the last year, in an attempt to understand how we can do this better, I've interviewed search committee chairs and Department Heads/School Directors who have recently engaged in job searches.  My research explores techniques by which teaching is evaluated as well as the effectiveness of these techniques.  In this blog post, I'd like to highlight some preliminary lessons I've learned, hopefully in time for their use in the current hiring season. 

First, in determining who to interview, I would advise departments to be intentional about the information they request from candidates. Departments could ask for a wide range of materials - teaching philosophies, sample syllabi, teaching evaluations, etc.. All of them reveal, and all obscure. For example, course evaluations can provide data, but the potential bias in instructor ratings should give pause (as should the problem of assigning a simple number to teacher quality). Course syllabi can be useful, but in different fields and at different career stages, candidates may have more or less ability or autonomy to produce their own course syllabi. 

In my interviews, I found some departments that continue to ask for the same information from candidates each year without stopping to see what has been valuable in the past.  Reasonable minds can disagree about what information should be sought; my recommendation would be that departments be intentional about what they are asking for and what they hope to learn from the information they request and how they will use such information.  

How about when the candidates get to campus? One common approach is to have candidates teach a mock class. If we do this, we ideally should ask the candidates to demonstrate the type of teaching they will do if hired.  If they will be expected to largely teach studio classes, perhaps they ought not be asked to teach a lecture course. If their teaching will be at the graduate level, finding a convenient sample of intro-level students may not provide useful data.  

I would also recommend a degree of uniformity be attached to the presentations by the candidates. While it might be hard to have every candidate teach the same class, giving them a reasonably similar scenario would be useful. Furthermore, some departments may prefer to invite the candidate to teach on a topic of their choosing, while others might tell the candidate their desired topic. Keeping things constant for all teaching demos will make them more comparable and hence more useful.  

There is certainly value in putting a candidate in front of an unfamiliar class to teach a one-off lesson. It lets us assess the content they provide, how well they manage class time, how well they can present material, and how they interact with and engage with students. A well-run classroom demonstration can separate strong candidates from weak candidates. Having seen both, the difference is readily apparent.

However, classroom demonstrations, in isolation, underemphasize two critical aspects of teaching. First, good teaching is often relational. I could perform well in front of a class of strangers, but much of my instructional effectiveness involves building connections with my students. I’d like to know if our prospective hire would and could work with students as a mentor for the Undergraduate Symposium or as a faculty advisor for a student organization. These considerations matter; but are not addressed much in a teaching demonstration.

My own experience, shared by many of my interviewees, is that allowing job candidates to meet with groups of students in an informal setting can provide valuable evidence. Giving students the opportunity to meet with the job candidate also provides the candidates themselves to see the students they might expect to teach if hired here.  I’ve seen these meetings work well with six to ten students, perhaps over lunch, with the department incentivizing student participation with pizza. Please consider doing this when you hire in the future - it provides useful information for both the students and the candidate.

I’ll make one more point about limitations of the classroom visit. When I interviewed at Eastern Michigan University (no, it was NOT called Eastern Michigan Normal College back then), I was invited to teach an existing class on a topic of my choosing. I chose to discuss the impact of question wording on public opinion poll results. I knew I could teach the topic well, with fun examples and with engaging activities. If I may say so, I nailed it.  As a teacher, I have been told that I fill a room with my enthusiasm and energy; I believe I did so during my interview. 

When I was done, a senior member of the department approached me, saying “Wow, you're certainly an entertainer in the classroom.” Having known this person (I was a lecturer here at the time), I took that as a backhanded compliment. They believed then, and continued to believe through the years we worked together, that I was a fun, entertaining, “cool” professor, perhaps to the exclusion of being a true scholar who would bring deep depth to teaching. After all, if you’re fun, you cannot possibly be a serious scholar.

I believed then, however, as I believe now, that teaching is intellectual work, and that a good teacher is deeply thoughtful and reflective about what they are doing and how they design classes. The opportunity to show off in front of a classroom allowed me to use my charm and charisma to engage a class. This played to my benefit, of course.  But, it did not allow me to engage in conversation about how I would design a course, outline my student learning outcomes, and use readings and assessments to bring the students to the desired end point. In other words, all the things that contribute to creating a meaningful course can get obscured in the artificial demonstration.

With this goal in mind - and I realize that this is a significant lift - I would encourage departments to think about opportunities not just to see teaching performed, but also to see it discussed and reflected upon. Lee Shulman, a dear mentor of mine, suggested we ask candidates to engage in a pedagogical colloquium as part of an interview. In it, job candidates might be invited to reflect upon a class they would offer, discussing the materials and assessments they would use, their main learning goals, and other such things. I would have enjoyed the opportunity to do this during my job interviews, to show that I did not just fill a room with my stage presence, but also that I had thought deeply about how what I was doing that day contributed to a semester-long learning experience for students.

The careful reader will realize that I have sketched out a capacious agenda for how we might evaluate our job candidates’ teaching potential. It may not be possible for departments to do all of these things. In the end, I would suggest intentionality before candidates are brought to campus. Before our plans for how to fill their time become a last-minute and rushed consideration, the search committee and department should consider what information needs to be gleaned and how they can get it most effectively.

I would welcome the chance to speak with any of you about how what I write here may apply to your circumstances. And, if you're hiring this academic year, I wish you a smooth and successful process.