Reader: what are teaching schools looking for?

In an email query this weekend, a reader asked:

"Teaching schools" (whatever vague and ill-defined collection of institutions that picks out) claim to value teaching. So one would think that applications at teaching schools would be evaluated along broadly the following lines:

(1) Will this person stick (e.g. Can this person do whatever is needed to get tenure, and are they going to stay and try to get it?)? If no, discard the application; if yes, go on.

(2) Do they have evidence of their ability to teach? If no, discard the application, if yes, go on.

(3) Among those that are left, look for those with the most evidence of having ability to meet our teaching needs.

This seems sensible. But here's the deal: I meet (1) for sure. And I have taught (actually taught; not just TA'd) more than 40 courses. And I've taught broadly. And I have great evaluations. So I *feel* like teaching schools should be beating down my doors. But they aren't.

What's more is that when I see who gets jobs, they've often taught maybe a half dozen courses. So what gives? Why are so many `teaching schools' overlooking all my teaching experience? Let's suppose for the sake of discussion that I'm not wildly messing up other parts of the application (I've had (and sometimes paid) enough people to look at my materials that that's plausibly the case.). 

The question, I guess, boils down to this: why don't teaching schools actually seem, in practice, to value teaching experience? In what bizarre-o world does it make sense to *hire* someone with demonstrably *less* experience doing what you claim is important in your job than many of the people you've refused to even *interview*?

I appreciate and empathize with the reader's frustrations. But allow me to offer a few thoughts in reply, and then open things up for discussion.

It's impossible, without seeing this person's dossier, to know what might be holding them back on the market. In my experience, it could be anything--including dossier materials themselves (as, in my experience, a fair number of candidates present themselves poorly in their cover letters, research statements, and teaching statements, irrespective of their accomplishments--which we can talk about if you like). However, one first reaction is that they may be underestimating what search committees at teaching schools are looking for. In their query, this reader imagines search committees at teaching schools going through something like a three-step process:

1. Will this candidate get tenure and not jump ship?
2. Do they demonstrate the ability to teach well?
3. Can they address the department's teaching needs?

In my experience, all of these things are indeed important. But they are by no means the only things that search committee members consider. They also consider how well a given candidate fits the department and institution where this is much broader than the courses one can teach (including idiosyncracies of individual search committee members); how original and interesting the candidate's research and teaching appear; what a candidate's online presence is like; what background the candidate has in service to the university and students outside of the classroom. Whether hiring departments should focus on some of these things is of course a normative question. Still, my sense is that search committees at teaching schools can care about all of these things, and tend to evaluate candidates holistically, not just narrowly focusing on whether the person is likely to get tenure and can teach courses effectively in the department (as an important aside, my sense is that one important reason for this is that there are usually dozens of candidates who satisfy questions 1-3 above).

A related issue here is that one should not, in my experience, underestimate the extent to which teaching schools can care about research. Generally speaking, people at teaching schools know they are not going to hire the next Kripke, or David Lewis, or Korsgaard, or whomever. That being said, people at many teaching schools do care about research--and in addition to qualitative judgments about how interesting a candidate's research appears, my experience is that teaching schools may care about quantity of research. During my time on the market, I found that the more I published, the more interviews I got at teaching schools--and, in some empirical research I did on recent hires, I found the publication quantity seemed very important at teaching schools (something which also coheres with my experience working at such a school: departments, tenure and promotion committees, deans, and other administrators tend to look favorably on research output). Finally, one reason why search committees at teaching schools may care about this is as a kind of 'tie-breaker.' If you have a lot of candidates who otherwise look similar (which in my experience is not uncommon), one obvious difference may be research output.

Finally, I think it is possible that for many jobs at teaching institutions, the answer to question 3 ('Can they address the department's teaching needs?') may be a threshold issue. For instance, in my department, there may be three particular courses that we would need a new hire to teach. So, if we were doing a hire, every candidate who had background experience with those courses would have what we are looking for--and the ability to teach other courses in addition to those may or may not play any role in deliberations (and, among those who can teach what one is looking for, one may use other things--research, service, etc.--when deciding who to interview). While this may seem disappointing--given how I've said teaching experience matters--I still think the broader one's teaching experience is, the better: as it may increase the number of departments one's experience makes one a good fit for.

I realize that, in an obvious sense, all of the answers I have just given may seem disappointing. What are teaching schools looking for? In a market as terrible as the one we find ourselves in, the honest-to-goodness answer is probably: everything. They are looking for people with good research outputs, teaching experience, 'fit', originality, projects they find interesting, how well one's dossier is put together, and so on. As someone who suffered on the market for seven years myself, I know all too well how impossible of an endeavor it can seem to figure out what hiring committees want. The only answer I was ever able to find--and one that worked for me over the course of the better part of a decade--was to work as far as I could to improve as a candidate across the board: to publish more, design and teach new courses, innovate as a teacher, and so on. At the end of the day, that is all one can do in a market like this. I really wish I had more comforting answers. But I don't. :/

To end on a somewhat more positive note, I think it may be worth it for candidates like our reader to seek out and consider community college jobs, if they aren't already. I have some friends who work in full-time faculty jobs at community colleges, and I have mostly heard great things. Community colleges are (or so I hear) looking for teachers, and I expect the more teaching experience one has, the more competitive for these jobs one is likely to be. I also expect CC jobs may have fewer applicants, as they do not seem to be advertised as widely. While some people put CC jobs down, I again have mostly heard very positive things from people who work at them. Fwiw

But these are just my thoughts. What do you all think?

Comments

[Perspective]

I think the person with the query is misunderstanding something. That they have taught forty courses does not put them ahead of everyone who has taught 30 or less courses. At teaching schools, we look for people with teaching experience. But six courses could be adequate to give a sense of one's abilities. One certainly does not count the courses taught in drawing up a short list. What you look for is some breadth, but breadth that matches needs. At small places, people might even be proprietary about particular courses. Someone might say: "We do not want this person who has taught philosophy of mind numerous times (for example) because I teach that". So even if they look good on other counts, they may be perceived as a threat to someone.
With that said, people are (sometimes) reasonable, so colleagues won't (always) stand by as a good candidate is pushed out of the running.

[Amanda]

I get the impression, but someone correct me if I"m wrong, that when it comes to the pure *number* of courses taught as lead instructor, it is kind of like a barrier standard. This is similar to how the GRE is used for grad school. If a student scores above a certain number, they are deemed as impressive enough to be seriously considered. Any extra amount above that number does not help much. Likewise, teaching schools want to see that a candidate has taught above a certain number of courses as lead instructor, I think that number is likely around 4-10. Anything above that number won't help much. Instead, a teaching school might look at the following factors:

-the variety of courses taught
-the type of institution and students one has taught
-creativity in syllabi, teaching statement, etc
-teaching recommendations from other instructors
-student evals
-special ability to connect with the students at the particular institution
-having gone to an institution similar to the one applying to when the candidate was an undergraduate.

Of course, these are only teaching aspects. There is also research and some other criteria.

[Anon]

I have been on search committees at a teaching school, and I will say this: I care less about how many courses you have taught and more about your teaching evaluations for the courses you have taught and your teaching reference (if you have one). This might not help the OP who claims to have great evals. So I'm not sure what's up with your application. I honestly just think that there are too many candidates with amazing applications out there and not enough jobs.

I also care a LOT about research. This is because you will not get tenure at my institution (a teaching institution) if you fail to publish consistently. As a search committee member, I am thinking: Will this candidate get tenure here? And my thoughts immediately go to research, because - from my perspective - it's harder to meet research tenure requirements than it is to meet teaching tenure requirements, at least where I am.

[SLAC tenured professor & chair]

Research is so important, even at so-called "teaching schools". What people fail to understand is that I don't even work at an elite teaching institution and we literally get hundreds of applications from amazing candidates. The last person we hired had multiple books with major university presses and a fantastic variety of articles. The one before that had published in 2 of the top 5 journals in philosophy by most people's standards. All of our last hires come from fantastic schools.

This thought that teaching and lots of it is sufficient for these jobs is hilarious. The market sucks (sadly), and as a result, smaller departments can be incredibly selective, and publishing is what is going to get your foot in those doors, and any others as far as I know.

[Derek Bowman]

Marcus: "A related issue here is that one should not, in my experience, underestimate the extent to which teaching schools can care about research."

SLAC prof/chair: "The market sucks (sadly), and as a result, smaller departments can be incredibly selective, and publishing is what is going to get your foot in those doors, and any others as far as I know."

Yes, this matches my experience and that of others I've known on the candidate side. It's why I find much of the dialogue about "teaching schools" highly misleading - basically inviting frustration of the sort captured by your reader's query.

I get why this is so - if the conversation assumes that everyone reading only knows about or is only interested in ranked R1s, then it makes some conversational sense to minimize the role of research.

But in practice, I think that defensiveness from those at teaching schools is out of place. Sure, you probably get lots of clueless applications from folks who don't understand what your school is about. But - as your reader's experience illustrates - you still get enough teaching-focused applicants to turn plenty of them away.

In general I wish candidates heard more from folks like 'SLAC tenured professor & chair" in these discussion.

[Sam Duncan]

One thing people seem to be overlooking here is that when we talk about breadth of teaching experience it's not just the number of different courses that one has taught that teaching schools might find relevant; the variety of institutions one has taught at also matters. Or at least it does for community colleges like the one I teach at. Teaching lots and lots of classes at Harvard or Stanford or even UVA or UNC successfully isn't necessarily predictive for being able to teach our students effectively. Those places have completely different populations of student than we do or than do most teaching focused state schools and many SLACs. For what it's worth, I don't teach that much differently here than I did as a grad student and adjunct at UVA, and to the extent I do I think a lot of that is that with more experience I've just gotten better at teaching. So my feeling is that if you can teach well at say UVA, UNC, or Berkeley you can almost certainly figure out how to do it here. But as previous posters have pointed out it's a buyers market so why should a teaching focused school take a risk on that when they almost certainly have applicants who've proved they can teach well at an institution like mine? (I don't necessarily agree with this thinking, but it's out there and it's not irrational.) One thing that will help applicants at many teaching focused jobs is to get some experience teaching at institutions that serve different student populations than do the sorts of schools that tend to have philosophy PhD programs.