A Demonstrated Ability to Teach

As a candidate, I often found the teaching demonstration to be a pretty horrible, if not downright risky, experience. Invited into someone else’s classroom, I would have to shoehorn in a sample lesson that sometimes didn’t really fit the course. I would go to great lengths to do my best, although in some classes, the students themselves were unprepared and unresponsive.

When a job candidate is tanking, the class period can be a long march of excruciating tedium.

My institution prioritizes strong teaching, and therefore we require job candidates to do a teaching demonstration. Afterward, we poll the department’s faculty members and survey students for their perceptions of the prospective faculty member. Because we know how difficult “cold” teaching can be, we try to emphasize to students their role in this important process.

This past semester I went out of my way to see a candidate for our English-department search in his classroom demonstration. Within the first few minutes, we all knew that he was a master teacher: relaxed, appropriately funny, and clearly in command of his specialty area. I was equally impressed with many of the students in the class; the “regular” professor had exhorted them in advance to be prepared and engaged. As I watched the class unfold, I was struck by how much the students, in fact, helped the prospective candidate make his case for the position.

First, do teaching demonstrations really make that much of a difference in your search deliberations, whether you are the candidate or the committee?

Second, how can we make those demonstrations more effective?