In the comments section of our newest "how can we help you?" thread, anon writes:
It emerged in discussions in recent-ish memory that some people have pretty short teaching dossiers.
How are those structured? When I put together just all my course evaluations, from about 12 courses, I have about 25 pages of material.
More generally, I guess I would be interested in hearing about guidelines for minimum and maximum lengths of the various sub-sections of the dossier.
This is a good query, as in my experience many candidates go wrong here. In reply to anon's query, 'On the Search' wrote:
Committees just do not want to see all your teaching evaluations. Let us imagine you submit 25 pages of evaluations. And let us assume that 120 people are applying for a job. That means there are 3000 pages of teaching evaluations. Do you think any committee will read this much?
Having served on three search committees now, I entirely agree…
One of the most frustrating things I've encountered as a search committee member is teaching portfolios that just seem thrown together–where the candidate includes page after page of raw evaluation data. Working through the raw data takes a great deal of time and effort, as each school's raw data reports are usually a bunch of cluttered tables. Job-applicants should realize that search committee members are strapped for time. We have to sift through hundreds of dossiers, and so literally thousands of pages of application materials. When candidates look like they didn't put much time or energy into their teaching portfolios–in ways that make our jobs more difficult–it may reflect badly on the candidate.
What should candidates do? In my view, a good teaching dossier includes a well-organized summary of recent evaluations, along with just a few raw reports (ones that may be curated a little bit). For example, consider my old teaching portfolio, which I posted several years ago in the entry in our Job-Market Boot Camp on teaching portfolios.
As you can see, after my teaching statement I included a simple table highlighting my averages on some evaluation items of likely interest across my last 16 courses. Notice: I didn't provide a table of every evaluation item (our evaluations have dozens of items). That, in my judgment, would be too much information. Instead, I focused on eight evaluation items that I judged search committee members likely to be most interested in. Then, after that table, I provided raw reports–in the form of charts–on several courses. Here I included more items, but still not every item, as I judged that would have been too cluttered. The charts provide a nice, simple visual of what my evaluations look like on the whole. Finally, I included complete and unedited student comments for those courses, which I think it is important. As I have mentioned before, although in my experience a lot of provide "select student comments", this is one of the worst things an applicant can do: it can make the candidate look like they may be trying to hide something, and may even lead search committee members to hunt around online (e.g. on RateMyProfessors). Let's be clear: if you get a job somewhere, you will not be able to hide from negative student comments (e.g. in annual reviews, tenure and promotion, etc.). It is important to demonstrate knowledge of this, and the maturity to not hide committees. Search committees are looking to hire professionals, and professionals in a university setting have to present themselves as they are, warts and all. In my experience, it looks far better to be open and transparent with your evaluations than to look like you are trying to hide something. And indeed, we all know that evaluations can be a mixed bag, tracking things like difficulty and 'hotness' more than teaching quality. Consequently, some negative comments may not harm you at all, whereas looking like you are trying to hide from negative comments just may harm you far more.
Anyway, one needn't model their teaching dossier after mine (and indeed, there are some things I would add to my dossier now). Moreover, I haven't exactly answered anon's questions directly (viz. minimum and maximum pages for different parts of the dossier). That being said, in a way I think these may be the wrong questions to ask. As you can see in my discussion above, my sense is that what matters most (in my experience) is how well structured and presented one's teaching dossier is. In my experience, many teaching dossiers don't even include a table of contents. This is the sort of thing that helps distinguish a good dossier from a mediocre one. I've seen teaching dossiers ranging from 10 pages to over 50 pages. Although the latter are probably too long in my experience, what seems to me to matter most, again, is how well organized and presented the material is.
But these are just my thoughts. What are yours, particularly those of you who have served on search committees?
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