Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Practical guidance for academic job seekers from professional career
counselors
Graduate students have ample opportunity in their daily lives to discuss
their research. They chat with fellow students, meet with their dissertation
advisers, present their findings at conferences, and may even try to explain
their work to family members outside academe.
But when do graduate students talk in a sustained way about their teaching?
They may talk about it initially in an orientation they have to attend
before starting work as teaching assistants. In some departments, they may take
a course on pedagogy. The lucky ones have access to a teaching and learning
center or to a TA-development program.
Few graduate students, however, have access to all of those opportunities,
with the result that many of them are ill-prepared to talk about their teaching
when it really matters -- during the academic job interview.
Many departments prepare candidates for the job market by conducting mock
interviews, which routinely include some teaching questions. But as a colleague
in literary studies reported to us, her mock interviews focused 85 percent on
research, while her actual interviews at the Modern Language Association's
annual convention focused 50 percent on teaching.
One of us is a career counselor for graduate students at Princeton
University, while the other two are assistant directors of teaching centers at
Princeton and at Vanderbilt University. We sought to deal with the imbalance we
see in candidates' preparation for job interviews by designing a workshop at
our institutions to give graduate students a chance to practice talking about
their teaching.
We want to share some of the insights from those workshops and offer some
practical advice on how to be better prepared to talk about teaching in the
next hiring season. In the process, we hope to encourage graduate students and
their faculty advisers to make teaching a more audible part of departmental
conversations. We've divided our advice into four categories of questions that
you may be asked in an academic job interview.
Teaching in the discipline. Say you are a historian. You may be
asked, "How would you teach a survey course on the Civil War?" One
way to answer that question is to list the texts you plan to teach or the topics
you plan to cover. But it's also important to indicate how you conceptualize
the course. What are the key themes or questions you would explore in class?
How will your understanding of the objects and methods of study in the field
inform the assignments you design and the grading criteria you use? How will
your teaching respond to intellectual or pedagogical debates in the field?
Our colleague in literary studies observed that in her initial preparation
for the job market, she focused too narrowly on the specific courses she might
teach, without adequately considering the broader issues of teaching and
learning in the discipline. Consult pedagogy journals in your field or talk
with your colleagues about how to effectively teach your students to think -- and
argue -- like biologists, sociologists, or art historians.
Promoting and assessing student learning. It's not just the
disciplinary content that matters. You'll also be expected to talk about your
teaching within the context of the classroom. You may be asked to provide
specific examples of how you will engage students and foster their learning.
For large classes, will you lecture in a traditional way or incorporate
active-learning strategies? What technologies do you anticipate using, and why?
Think about how you will use small groups or in-class writing assignments to
stimulate learning.
How will you evaluate student learning both formally and informally
throughout the semester? What kinds of exams, essays, reports, and other
assignments do you find most effective in your field? In what combination or
sequence will you use them? How might a service-learning component enhance the
learning experience for students? You might also want to mention some of the
low-stress classroom assessment techniques you might use to gauge on a daily or
weekly basis what your students understand and where they need further
information or assistance.
Working with sensitive issues. In disciplines where race, class,
gender, religious traditions, or ethical issues are at the core of inquiry,
instructors can expect some tension, or even conflict, to arise in the
classroom. If you are in one of those disciplines, you may be asked about how
you plan to handle such conflicts. How will you develop ground rules for
discussion -- by yourself or in collaboration with your students? How will you
teach them to engage in debate in a civil and respectful manner?
Because undergraduates frequently rely on anecdotes and personal experiences
to stake a claim or make an argument, you may want to talk in your interview
about activities that will lead them to understand what constitutes appropriate
evidence in your discipline.
Using research to inform your teaching. You may be asked to talk
about the relationship -- sometimes antagonistic, sometimes generative --
between research and teaching. Consider how you will teach your research. In a
graduate seminar, how will you construct your dissertation's argument -- and
invite counterarguments -- over the course of the semester? What parts of your
research can you teach to undergraduates? What ideas or assumptions are likely
to be challenging for them?
Reflect on how you will involve undergraduates in your research, especially
if you're applying to liberal-arts colleges, and be prepared to share those
ideas in your interview. How will you motivate their participation in your
experiment or project? What aspects of your research can they successfully
undertake?
More generally, consider how you will involve undergraduates in the process
of intellectual inquiry that drives your research. How can you put questions
and problems at the heart of your teaching, helping students formulate and test
hypotheses even at the introductory level?
Putting it all together. You can formulate your answers in a variety
of ways, but be sure not to limit yourself to those four categories of
questions. It also helps to generate additional questions specific to your
discipline that might come up in an interview.
With that groundwork in place, once you get an interview, you can then do a
little directed research on the college. An institution's Web site can give you
valuable information about its history, mission, and goals for the future.
Additionally, you may be able to learn more about the type of students it
attracts. Compare that profile with the students you've taught at your graduate
institution. What adjustments in your expectations and pedagogy might you need
to make?
Similarly, a thorough search of a departmental Web site can deepen your
knowledge of the college's curriculum and possibly hint at whether your
teaching style will mesh with those of your potential colleagues.
Using what you've learned about yourself as a teacher and about the
department where you may be a colleague, practice answering questions about
teaching. In our workshops at Princeton and Vanderbilt, we gave participants
the opportunity to practice being a job candidate and being the one doing the
hiring. Many participants found the exercise more difficult than they had
imagined.
But just think about how much more difficult it might have been had they
waited until the actual interview to engage in that exercise.
Patricia Armstrong is assistant director of Vanderbilt University's Center
for Teaching, Kathleen L. Mannheimer is a counselor for graduate students at
Princeton University's Career Services office, and Katherine Stanton is
assistant director of Princeton's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.