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“Courses you are prepared to teach”?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

At “The Professor is In” (https://theprofessorisin.com/2016/08/19/dr-karens-rules-of-the-academic-cv/), it mentions that you may want to have a section on your CV for “courses you are prepared to teach”.

I am a PhD candidate beginning to eye the job-market. When approaching this category, how much material would you think is necessary to have ready to claim to be prepared to teach the course?

I would imagine that just having a syllabus written is insufficient, but I would also imagine that literally having a semester’s worth of lectures written out long hand is way more than necessary. What should I be shooting for if I would like have a portfolio of courses prepared, beyond the few courses I have independently taught on my one, that I can claim on my CV in this way?

These are good questions, and I’m curious to hear answers from people who have served on search committees. Personally, I suspect search committees are going to want some kind of evidence that a candidate has sufficient background in a given area to step in and teach a given course. For example, does the course fall in a candidate’s AOS or AOC? Has the candidate taken graduate coursework on the topic? (If so, it could be good to list graduate courses somewhere in the CV). Finally, has the candidate been a TA in the course for another instructor, or better yet have they actually taught the course before themselves?

But these are just my thoughts. What do readers think, particularly search committee members?

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11 responses to ““Courses you are prepared to teach”?”

  1. Daniel

    Some people will be very conservative and basically only list courses they’ve taught before and others will be very liberal and list courses they could teach their first semester if they were hired. Because there is no generally agreed-upon standard, I ignore this sort of information on a CV. I can’t know what the candidate has in mind when they write it, so I can’t draw any conclusions from it.

    If you put a gun to me and forced me to add this section to my CV, I would choose the very liberal interpretation, because it seems to me the most relevant to the person hiring. After all, they need me to teach when I’m hired, not before. So, all they need to know is which courses I could teach if I were chosen for the job. But, of course other people adopt a more conservative view, like Marcus, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

    I think in light of all the confusion it’s perhaps best just to leave it off the CV. Or, use the most conservative interpretation, because that won’t annoy other people who have that interpretation, and hope that this won’t hurt you among people who use a more liberal interpretation (but in some cases I think it might!).

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    Think of it this way – when you list a course as one you are prepared to teach, you are inviting the committee to ask pointed questions about how and what you would teach. And some of the questions might come from someone who has taught the course or has researched in the area. So, be prudent.

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  3. Anonymous

    In my opinion, putting “courses I am prepared to teach” on a CV is making a category mistake. A curriculum vitae is a personal history, a record of accomplishments. Being prepared to teach something stretches the ordinary meaning of “accomplishment.” (Do “committees I’m prepared to participate in” or “papers I’m prepared to write” go on a CV?)

    I would address this explicitly in a cover letter, be prepared with sample syllabi, and leave it off the CV.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    This does not go on the CV. What does go on is your list of AOCs, which give a sense of what you’re prepared to teach. You can also include a list of the graduate courses you’ve taken.

    In the teaching portfolio, you should include syllabi for courses you are prepared to teach. Between that and the above, we have all the I formation we need at this stage.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    If you say you are prepared to teach course X, then when I interview you, I expect you to be able to talk about what you would teach, what readings you would include, why you would teach it a particular way versus another way, etc. We regularly disqualify candidates at the interview stage when it becomes clear that they are not prepared to step into the classroom and effectively teach a course that they claim to be prepared to teach. (I’m at an R1)

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  6. Anonymous

    I feel like we should kill this trend because it is so wildly unclear. In general I think most people can, if given a few weeks notice, teach most things in their area broadly construed to undergrads, or at the very least to early-stage undergrads.

    For example, I don’t work in bioethics. I have never taught bioethics. I don’t have a syllabus for bioethics or any particular readings in mind on the topic. I encounter work in the field at the margins but I never deliberately look it up or seek it out. But if you told me I was teaching such a class next semester, I would be fine. I would panic read my way through a bunch of things and know who to call and I am very confident that I could get myself to the level of comprehension necessary to push undergrads to understand/see the puzzles/get a sense of the scope of the field.

    The only interesting question is something like “is there an area you are prepared to teach in that we would never think possible from your AOS/AOC/published work/public presentations etc?” (As in, nothing in my profile would suggest I could competently teach a class in, say, Ancient Chinese philosophy or advanced logic with a few weeks notice, so if I actually could, that would be worth knowing!)

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    For me personally, I do not think that there is anything wrong with this category on cv. There are limited jobs, and many people on the market do not have the “ideal” experience. If you are truly prepared to teach an interesting course or a course that fits well with the hiring department, mentioning it is all you can do. And given that some departments do not look at teaching documents for the first round, mentioning it on the cv is totally fine to me. If we are hiring, we would like to know some interesting courses that you are prepared to teach although you did not have a chance to do it.

    Now to the question of what it means. When I was on the market, my advisor told me that to claim that you are prepared to teach a course you need to be able to tell a complete “story” about the course. I think that is a helpful suggestion. You need to say how you see the course fits in a bigger picture (the curriculum or a general set of learning outcomes), why you choose certain reading materials, how you design the assignments, what other materials or assignments you considered but did not include, what challenges you might expect, etc.

    Reply
  8. Anonymous

    I would include it — even if you haven’t written up a syllabus — as long as you can, with evident enthusiasm, talk about how you’d want to teach it and why, including why you’d include Article/Book X in the assigned readings, or exclude a reading widely assigned in these sorts of courses.

    Reply
  9. Anonymous

    I don’t have such a category on my CV and I wasn’t aware of this practice. Instead, I was advised to include a page in the teaching portfolio with a list of courses taught and a list of courses I’m also prepared to teach. I don’t have anything like a prepared syllabus for the courses I claim to be able to teach, however, they all either relate to my research or are topically adjacent to other classes that I have actually taught.

    I’ve never had anyone in an interview ask directly about this list of classes. However, I have been asked about how I would teach classes that they posted in their ad.

    If questioned, I think having an entire syllabus already prepared is more than what’s needed to demonstrate that you can teach a class. You may get asked what readings or textbook you would assign. Nobody during an interview will ask you to produce lecture slides for a hypothetical class.

    Reply
  10. Anonymous

    Fwiw, I started putting in my teaching portfolio (not CV) courses I can teach, but noting if I needed 1 or 2 semester advanced notice. I felt like that was more useful for search committees. ‘prepared’ always struck me as unhelpfully imprecise.

    Reply
  11. Anonymous

    Since philosophy has AOC as a thing (where other disciplines do not), I don’t think it’s necessary to list courses you can teach separately. I have interviewed people who have gone through our course list and identified specific course codes that they can teach and we were suitably impressed by the effort, but I don’t think that affected our decision making much. It shows that the candidate is serious about this job, but we kinda assume that of all candidates anyway. So, I’d say: it doesn’t hurt to add it; it probably doesn’t help either.

    Reply

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