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How much teaching experience should a job seeker have?

Brian Leiter

A reader writes:

I'm a graduate student who has received conflicting advice about the importance of teaching experience on the academic job market. From some folks I have heard that having plenty of experience teaching one's own courses (while in graduate school) is a plus on the job market. From others I've heard that one can have too much teaching experience (i.e., teaching more than a couple of courses on one's own is potentially harmful on a CV). Of course, I understand that the kind of jobs one is applying for (primarily research or teaching) matters. Perhaps you and your readers would be kind enough to share your thoughts on this issue. How much teaching experience should one have when applying for research jobs vs. teaching jobs?

Thoughts from readers?  Signed comments preferred, as usual, but current or recent job seekers can post anonymously.

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10 responses to “How much teaching experience should a job seeker have?”

  1. Michael Kremer

    I would think having taught a lot of one's own courses could only have a negative impact indirectly, insofar as it affected other aspects of one's CV — increasing time to degree, reducing number of publications or presentations, etc. I would never view a large number of courses taught as a negative aspect of an application, per se.

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  2. James Harold

    At a highly-ranked liberal arts college, having some teaching experience matters quite a bit, but quality is more important than quality. Having taught one excellent class, plus some TA experience, some thoughtful, creative syllabi (*not* copying out the ToC from a popular anthology), and a strong teaching letter are, together, excellent evidence of strong promise as a teacher.

    It can be useful to teach a bit more if you want to demonstrate that you have real teaching interests and ability outside of your field of research. E.g., if you're a philosopher of science, but you want to show that you can and would teach an excellent medical ethics class, despite having little coursework in the area, the best evidence of this is that you actually have taught a medical ethics course, and done it well.

    As for "too much" teaching experience, it's not bad (again, at a liberal arts college that values both research and teaching) in and of itself, but the evaluations should still be very good, and of course if you're spending that much time teaching you're probably not spending as much time on research, which *will* hurt your chances.

    You certainly don't want to do more teaching just to do more teaching. So, once you've got a strong teaching portfolio, you're normally better off working and polishing your research.

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  3. Recent Job Seeker

    It depends almost entirely on the position. Schools that are focused on teaching often want to see not just that you've taught well, but that you can teach a range of courses, because they're going to need someone with some breadth. Having taught something outside your AOS well is good evidence that you will be able to do that if hired. (But they also might be looking more at people with more experience, too.) Schools that aren't focused on teaching (and this includes some SLACs) don't seem to care much at all beyond ensuring the candidate isn't a complete disaster in the classroom.

    In any case, I'd say that the difference between being acceptable at teaching (some experience, good letters, strong evals) and being excellent at teaching (lots of experience, excellent letters, fantastic evals) is marginal at best. If your teaching is decent, polish the research.

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  4. James Harold

    Please amend my comment above to read "quality is more important than quantity" —

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  5. Anon

    Do people really take into account teaching evaluations? If so, to what degree? They seem to me to be a terribly misleading way to assess the quality of teaching.

    Reply
  6. James Harold

    My college takes teaching evaluations into account in tenure decisions, so my department takes them into account in hiring decisions. I'm not going to defend the accuracy of teaching evaluations here — they are nowhere near perfect — but I don't see that there are other instruments for measuring teaching quality that are superior, at least not that a hiring committee would have access to.

    As for degree, I tend to pay most attention to the extremes: really exceptional evaluations, and really lousy ones. The latter can hurt an application, and the former can help. We do try to read them with some care — we try to weed out "easy A" evaluations, for example, and we make sure that the evaluations are complete and not simply a selection of the most positive comments.

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  7. Anon

    To James Harold:

    That seems a sensible way to use them. I have one more question, pertaining to this issue, however.

    At the university where I am currently, the teaching evaluations are very poorly written, and I am inclined to think that they would be less informative than other possible evaluations. [E.g. one of the questions concerns whether the instructor speaks at an audible volume.] Do you find that there are differences between quality of evaluation forms between various universities, and do these have any effect on how job candidates are evaluated?

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  8. James Harold

    To Anon:

    Yes, we see a lot of that. It would be wrong to discriminate against students whose universities happen to use opaque, uninformative, or confusing evaluation forms, and so we try hard not to do so. I tend to look around the file for other teaching information that might fill in the gaps. You might want to put a cover letter in your file explaining your forms or contextualizing them — or ask the faculty member writing your teaching letter to do so.

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  9. Anon 2

    To James Harold:

    Could you say more about what counts as an "easy A" evaluation? In the teaching evaluations for my university, there is a place for students to indicate which grade they expect to get. So if most of the students predict that they will get an A does that count as an "easy A" evaluation? Or do you have in mind written evaluations that explicitly say the student likes the instructor because the instructor gives out easy A's? Or do you mean something else?

    Many thanks.

    Reply
  10. James Harold

    To Anon 2:

    Again, hard to say. It's easier to find evidence that the class was not an "easy A" — comments from students indicating that the course was challenging, and yet rewarding. And students often comment on, and most forms ask about, how hard they worked, how much effort they put in.

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