The Two-Year Track

Meets Expectations

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person The Rejection Letter I Wish I Could Send If we had to make up a story for why you might be interested in our position, then interviewing you was too risky. Peer Review Hirings and Firings The new law school at the University of California at Irvine gets some high-profile hires ... and other appointment news. Ms. Mentor Does This Make Me Look Old? Advice on how best to dress, and act, when you look as young as your students. Career News Gone, and Being Forgotten Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Rob Jenkins

In her March column, Ms. Mentor posed the question, "Do I hafta publish?" For the majority of readers in her target audience -- doctoral students or freshly minted Ph.D.'s pursuing appointments at research universities or four-year colleges -- the short answer is yes.

But for my primary audience -- those newly hired or seeking positions at two-year colleges -- the answer is, for the most part, no.

(Whether or not faculty members at community colleges should publish is a separate question, and one I hope to address in a future column. But if the emphasis is on Ms. Mentor's "hafta," then no is the correct answer.)

The obvious next question, then, is, What will you have to do as a faculty member at a two-year college to keep -- and excel at -- your job?

Like your counterparts at four-year institutions, you'll probably be evaluated regularly, with those evaluations factoring into decisions regarding continued employment, tenure, and promotion. College systems in some states (like Georgia, where I work) even tie pay raises to annual performance reviews.

The overwhelming majority of two-year colleges describe themselves as teaching institutions, meaning that teaching (and specifically not research) is their primary mission. Administrators at our colleges, then, judge faculty members largely on how well they perform in the classroom. They may also be evaluated on their service and other "professional activities" (that's generally code for attending conferences and workshops), but teaching effectiveness will always be paramount.

Gauging effective teaching can be a little harder than measuring a stack of publications. That's why two-year colleges typically use a variety of methods, including self-evaluation (the dreaded "annual report"), supervisor and/or peer reviews (classroom observations), and student evaluations (to the chagrin of many).

Of those methods, the one over which you have the most control is the self-evaluation, which usually takes the form of a narrative. In that document, you describe your teaching activities for the past year, placing special emphasis on the assignments, tests, and projects you gave to students and on how you used class time.

In short, the self-evaluation is your chance to spell out exactly what you have done over the past year to help students learn. It should be fairly short -- two to three single-spaced pages is plenty. It should be collegial rather than pedantic in tone, and focused more on actual activities than on philosophy (although philosophical comments can be included in order to place the activities in context, as in "Because I believe . . ., I frequently have my students . . .").

The narrative also gives you a chance to highlight any new or innovative teaching approaches you might have employed during the past year. (Note that a strategy doesn't necessarily have to be cutting edge to be new to you.)

Administrators at two-year college are particularly interested lately in any activity involving technology. It may be true that some forms of classroom technology are no better than "gilded chalk," as a colleague of mine used to say, but most experienced faculty members have identified specific applications that are useful to them. Only by trying various approaches can you discover what works and doesn't work in your classroom. If nothing else, your attempts will make excellent fodder for your annual report.

In addition to your narrative and copies of your syllabi, be sure to include examples of assignments, tests, and other handouts that you use in your courses. Your department head may well ask for those documents specifically as part of the evaluation process, but even if he or she doesn't, you should attach them. To the extent that you have control over which documents to include, go with those that most clearly support the assertions in your narrative.

Another way that two-year colleges evaluate teaching is through classroom observation by a peer or a supervisor. If you're a new faculty member, you can almost certainly expect visitors -- probably a department head or a dean, but perhaps a veteran colleague -- at least for the first semester or two and perhaps well beyond. Those visits may be scheduled in advance or can occur unannounced, depending on the institution's guidelines.

The only way to deal with the uncertainty of an unscheduled visit is to be well prepared for your classes so that you won't panic when your department chairman walks through the door.

It's also not a bad idea to develop a variety of extra activities that can be plugged in at a moment's notice to demonstrate your awareness of various learning styles. When that unexpected visitor shows up, just pull one of those activities out of your teacher's bag of tricks and violà, instant good impression.

Finally, if you expect to get good performance reviews, your student evaluations must be acceptable, at the very least. Volumes have been written on the subject of student evaluations of teaching, and I won't attempt to rehash that discussion here. Suffice it to say that, for community-college instructors, student evaluations are probably always going to be part of the equation. That's just a fact of professional life.

The "secret" to getting good ratings from students isn't really a secret at all, or even much of a mystery -- and it doesn't involve giving everyone an A.

As an instructor, you can be as demanding as you want, within reason, so long as you are respectful to students (no verbal abuse, please, and limit your sarcasm) and consistent in your dealings with them. Treat your students the way you would have liked your professors to treat you.

Beyond merely behaving like a decent human being, one of the best and easiest things you can do to improve your student ratings is to obtain a copy of the evaluation instrument at the beginning of the term and read through it to see what questions it asks.

If students are going to evaluate you based on how promptly you return graded assignments, for example, then put a little extra effort into returning assignments promptly. And make sure they understand what "prompt" means (getting their English essays back the next day is usually an unrealistic expectation).

If the evaluation form asks students about the relevance of your tests, then take special care to make sure your tests relate directly to the subject matter you have covered, and be sure to point out frequently during lectures and class discussions what sorts of questions you might ask on the tests.

By following those few guidelines, you stand a good chance of being rated highly in the "teaching effectiveness" portion of your annual performance review. Of course, you may also be evaluated based on your service to the institution and on the quality and quantity of your professional development activities. I'll talk about both of those areas in my next column.

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at the Lawrenceville campus of Georgia Perimeter College. He writes occasionally for our community-college column.