Ask the Administrator: Statements of Teaching Philosophy

A returning correspondent writes:

I have to write a statement of teaching philosophy for a job I’m applying
for. What makes these statements useful to the reader? Is there anything I
can look for in the institution to get an understanding of that they are
looking for in such a statement?

I have a certain sympathy for this question, since I'll need to do something similar ('statement of administrative philosophy') for an interview next month.

In my experience on hiring committees, I've usually found statements of teaching philosophy more airy than useful. They're usually pretty disconnected from the ways people actually teach -- “I want my students to reach for the stars” “I don't just believe in lectures” -- and I've never noticed a correlation between well-written or interesting statements and good teaching. It may exist, but I haven't seen it.

It's a variation on the interview-questions-that-won't-die. “What's your biggest weakness?” (I'm always tempted to say something like “well, that would probably be my crippling addiction to heroin,” but some people just have no sense of humor at all.) “Where do you want to be in five years?” (“Finally off probation!”) “How would you describe yourself?” (“Sympathetically.”) “What words do people use to describe you?” (Which people? How about “devilishly handsome, with a rakish glint in his eye”? “A younger, buffer George Clooney.” “Mostly harmless.” “Carbon based, and apparently featherless.”)

The kabuki aspect of job interviews is such that they're revealing only when people screw up. (Presidential debates are much the same way.) I've been on multiple search committees for vice presidents, and in my experience there, every candidate has said something like “I'm not a micromanager.” It's just part of the script. Sometimes it's true, sometimes not, but knowledge of the script is taken as a sign of a sort of fundamental savvy. My contrarian side would like, just once, to see someone say “damn right I'm a micromanager!,” but I'm not holding my breath. And the candidate brave or stupid enough to try it wouldn't get the job, even if I appreciated the chuckle.

So we come to the statement of teaching philosophy. It needs to be earnest enough that it looks like you put thought into it, anodyne enough that it doesn't offend anybody with a pet pedagogical hobbyhorse, and well-crafted enough that it doesn't reveal something negative by mistake. My bias – and I'll admit it's just my own – is in favor of theorizing from the ground up. Ground your theoretical flights in actual anecdotes from classes you've taught. When in doubt, go specific. I also happen to like statements that show some sort of learning. “I discovered that I had to adjust x when y happened.” “The style I had developed at Snooty U had to be modified when I taught at Working Class College.” Statements like those suggest actual thought, and the ability to recognize (and adjust) when something isn't working. I like people who can learn from their failures, which presumes that they can recognize their failures as such. I instinctively distrust people who never admit mistakes.

In terms of customizing, a good place to start would be to get a clear sense of the institution's profile. Is it super-selective, or a dumb-rich-kid's school, or a former teacher's college, or an open-admissions cc? What does the teaching load look like? (If possible, get a sense not only of how many classes you'd teach, but at what level, and at what size.) Who are the students? If you write an eloquent essay about spending lots of time tutoring students one-on-one, and the job calls for teaching intro sections of 300 students a pop, you're writing yourself out of consideration. If you write about dynamic multimedia lectures and the average class size is 12, the same is true. Applying to a cc, it's good to address the issue of 'academically underprepared' students, and how you've helped them succeed. Don't bash technology, but the degree to which you embrace it should vary based on the degree to which the school seems to value it. At a SLAC, you might be able to evade it entirely. At many colleges, though, the clash between the irresistible force of new technology and the immovable object of senior faculty is resolved by valuing technical skills in new hires. Again, the more specific you can be, the better.

Different academic disciplines may also have various buzzwords at given times that you either must or mustn't mention.

Worldly, wise readers – any helpful hints?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at ccdean (at) myway (dot) com.

Ask the Administrator: You've Got to be Kidding...

A regular reader writes:

A probationary faculty member in my college plagiarized his entire statement of teaching philosophy in his RST (Rank, Salary, and Tenure) file. Not just lifted a few phrases, but downloaded someone else's teaching philosophy from the Internet, omitted a few paragraphs that were too specifically about the actual author, and put it in his file.

The department has talked to the faculty member, and he "realizes that this is a serious matter" and he's really sorry. I say that I hear that kind of crap from my students way too often. I don't have to put up with it from them, and I sure don't want to put up with it from a colleague. Somewhere in the course of his advanced degree program, they should have mentioned that plagiarism was bad.

As far as I'm concerned, this is sufficient reason to vote for a terminal contract. The department feels otherwise (although I gather that they are split.) What do you think?

That's amazing.

This is where the 'law and order' side of my 'law and order liberal' politics comes out. I'd fire the dumb bastard. The rule against plagiarism is fair, it's directly relevant to the academic enterprise, and this guy doesn't even dispute that he did it. Throw the bum out.

A friend of mine at a comprehensive university recently had a book project canceled out from under him when a chapter submitted by his co-author turned out to have been lifted wholesale from Wikipedia. (His co-author has tenure; he doesn't.) This is not a victimless crime. My guess is that folks who get away with this keep doing it, though I'd imagine it's much easier to catch in the age of Google.

Just for fun, let's imagine what happens if, say, this joker gets tenure, but someone else who actually made an honest effort gets shot down. For more fun, let's assume the denied candidate is a member of a protected class. In administrative terms, it's “liability-a-go-go.” Let's imagine the courtroom dialogue. “Did you know that Mr. Whiteman's portfolio contained plagiarized material?” “Well, yes, but we didn't think it was any big deal.” “Did you have any reason to suspect that Ms. Unemployed's file was illegitimate?” “No, but we thought it wasn't up to snuff.” “So you define 'up to snuff' as 'plagiarized'? Or do you define 'up to snuff' as 'white and male”?”

Not pretty.

On an emotional level, I couldn't help but read your candidate's actions as somewhere between 'arrogant' and 'contemptuous.' If he really can't be bothered to try to whip something up to keep his job, what does he think of his job? Is that really someone you want to make bulletproof for the next several decades? If he escapes consequences now, when he's at least potentially vulnerable, can you imagine the crap he'll pull once he's tenured? This guy will be an ongoing nightmare for the rest of his career, and he will be a nightmare of your department's making.

I'm guessing that some of your colleagues feel bad for him, probably on the grounds that they think of statements of teaching philosophy as inherently vapid and extraneous. There's some truth to that, but that's an argument to be had on its own merits. (In eight years of observing and evaluating faculty, I haven't noticed any correlation – none – between good statements of teaching philosophy and good teaching.) But that's not a justification for cheating. It's a justification for trying to get the rules changed going forward. The issue here isn't whether a statement of teaching philosophy carries any weight; it's whether honesty does.

If it doesn't, you're in very deep trouble.

What if the guy starts fabricating outcomes assessments? What if he publishes something that turns out to have been plagiarized? And do you really want this guy judging other candidates for promotion and tenure in the future? My brain hurts just thinking about it.

Kick him to the curb. If you don't, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Wise and worldly readers – what would you do?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

The Desks Have Ears

Last week the Chronicle featured a story about an uproar at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater about a video recording that a student had made surreptitiously of a guest lecturer.  The video apparently showed the lecturer making some inflammatory statements about Republicans; it was picked up by Fox News, and the rest is predictable.

It reminded me of some discussions I’ve had over the last couple of years on campus about student recordings.  It’s a much murkier issue than it used to be.

When I was starting out in the classroom, a clandestine video recording would have been a challenge.  Cameras were big and expensive, and the quality of video and sound was often quite poor.  And distribution was still pretty much at a primitive stage.  Unless you somehow got your cassette into the hands of an interested news producer, which would have taken some connections and some doing, it probably wouldn’t get very far.

Now, of course, many students carry smartphones or other devices that make high-quality recording both simple and subtle.  YouTube and similar platforms make instant, wide distribution easy.  There’s still the issue of whether people will find the piece and care about it, but the first-order issues of production and distribution are substantially solved.  And if you have a sensational enough hook, the rest will take care of itself.

I’m glad I came up when I did.  Teaching in my field -- political science -- inevitably means touching on some controversial issues.  That’s doubly true in teaching political philosophy.  When introducing a new thinker or school of thought, for example, it’s commonplace to adopt a “devil’s advocate” position and try to present that school of thought in the most sympathetic way possible.  The idea is to push students to grapple with the actual content of the ideas, rather than just immediately assigning them to “good” and “bad” and being done with it.  I sometimes told students that they didn’t really understand a school of thought until they understood why a smart, well-meaning person would be willing to take a bullet for it.  Because in politics, they have.

When the devil’s advocate method works, it becomes clear that worldviews other than one’s own often have some sort of internal coherence, and that positions taken on certain questions have consequences for other things.  Of course, it doesn’t always work; frequently, students would recoil from foreign ideas, sputtering until they hit cliches that they would grab with palpable relief.  The idea that we might be able to learn something from, say, Marx or Nietzsche, was just too threatening for some students to entertain.

The devil’s advocate method -- and any method that relies on extended, non-hostile examination of threatening ideas -- requires the trust that you won’t be taken out of context.  It’s the same willing suspension of disbelief that allows actors to play parts.  If an actor playing a character murders another character onstage, we don’t call the police; we understand that it’s part of a performance.  But as a culture, we don’t yet understand the classroom that way.  We still think of professors, for the most part, as either telling the truth or pushing their own personal agendas.  (Whether that distinction always makes sense is another question.)  We don’t give professors the latitude we give actors.  I shudder to think what could have happened if some student had recorded and distributed five well-chosen minutes of a presentation on communism or fascism. Out of context, it could have looked awful.  Out of context, it would have been.  

As a professor, I always took care to explain to students the ground rules of what I was doing.  Grappling with ideas requires being able to try them on for size before rejecting them.  Some will surprise you.  But a five-minute video wouldn’t include any of that.  It would just show a seemingly monstrous professor ranting.

In an earlier age, the answer would have been to ban unauthorized recordings.  We do that on my own campus, as I would bet that many do.  But I suspect there’s an expiration date on that policy, as recording gets progressively easier to do and harder to detect.  In the meantime, recording is becoming normal in the contexts of disability accommodations and online instruction.  Students with certain kinds of disabilities often receive permission to record classes as part of their accommodation plans, though those plans also include strict prohibitions on unauthorized distributions of those recordings.  And everything that happens in an online class is de facto recorded, just in the course of things.  That’s inherent in the structure of an asynchronous class. It’s a feature, not a bug. The folks who profess horror at classroom recordings tend not to mention online courses, though they’re increasingly relevant.

I’m thinking that the way to address out-of-context recordings is not to ban them -- it’s a bit late for that -- but to flood the zone with context.  

If the problem is that people don’t understand the concept of the devil’s advocate, then provide plenty of examples of it.  The five-minute excerpt of the fascism discussion would look a whole lot less threatening if it were surrounded by the hour-plus of context-setting, rebutting, discussing, and housekeeping.  Part of the power of the forbidden snippet is precisely that it’s forbidden, which suggests that there’s something to hide.  There isn’t.  Put it out there, and educate the part of the public that cares.  That’s supposed to be our mission anyway.

I understand the appeal of a return to the golden age, but it isn’t going to happen.  If the desks have ears, let’s make sure everyone else does, too.  Otherwise, we’re at the mercy of the one student with a chip on his shoulder and a phone in his hand.