The Presentation: Testing Potential New Faculty's Ability to Teach

The Presentation: Testing Potential New Faculty's Ability to TeachAuthor(s): Paul SawyerSource: AAUP Bulletin, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Dec., 1974), pp. 379-382Published by: American Association of University ProfessorsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40224803 .

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The Presentation: Testing Potential New Faculty's Ability To Teach

Paul Sawyer

when the paucity of students and the plethora of pedagogues have abated, when the groves of upper

academe, judiciously pruned and intelligently fertilized, are healthy, the problem of selecting new faculty will

again lie heavily upon us. Indeed, it lies upon us today, even if not so heavily as heretofore, since there are not so many positions available and infinitely more applicants for them. But if we have fewer opportunities to fill a

vacancy, with the abundance of candidates the selection is in some ways more difficult than it ever was. Yet the procedure by which a candidate is chosen remains - in the vast majority of institutions of higher learning - un- necessarily limited in its resources and often disappoint- ing in its results.

In a relatively few schools (frequently the largest or the ivy-est) the question of whom to hire is easily answered: find the man or woman who has the best pub- lication record in the highly specialized field in which the vacancy occurs. Accordingly, the chairman of a department, or some department members, or a com- mittee therefrom supplemented by an administrator or two, will conscientiously peruse the works by an applicant and pass critical judgments upon those works. Largely independent of any other factors, they arrive at a consensus and a name or two. But at most, if not all, of the other institutions, teaching ability is the primary consideration. However, to discover how good a teacher a candidate is, most schools rely upon an abysmally small quantity of data. The credentials of candidates contain much about their abilities and achievements as students, as dissertation writers, as socially acceptable compotators. Sometimes the credentials contain tributes to diligence, to trustworthiness, infrequently to brilliance and originality, but usually nothing is stated about their

teaching. On occasion there may be a sentence or two, but never in my examination of stacks of dossiers have I seen anything relating to a candidate's teaching ac- cumulate to a well-developed paragraph. And obviously, for the substantial number of applicants who have never taught, there can be no statements in their files about their teaching. What I am suggesting is a procedure I and others call a presentation, a procedure by which a demonstration of a candidate's teaching ability becomes a regular part of the campus visit, which is nowadays a standard preliminary to the tendering of a contract. This article and its recommendations derive from the ex- periences over several years of several departments -

among them sociology, political science, and especially English of which I was the interim head - at Bradley University. But the presentation did not originate at Bradley, which happens to be a private, middle-sized urban university (in Peoria, Illinois), and it has been used in a variety of forms at a small number of institutions in the United States. It is my hope in writing this article that many more schools will be persuaded to in- corporate it as a required part of the hiring process. The benefits to all concerned - students, faculty, administration, and yea! the candidates too - will be significant.1

Quite simply, the presentation is a kind of teach-in. When the candidate is invited to the campus, he or she is informed that he is expected to teach a lesson of thirty to fifty minutes (traditionally the collegiate hour). The candidate should be urged to prepare the lesson carefully, since it will be one of several factors considered in the overall judgment of his desirability as a faculty member. He can use any method he likes: lecture, question and answer, discussion, any combination of

PAUL SAWYER is Professor of English at Bradley Uni- versity.

1 An earlier article on this subject, "The Presentation: Its Role in Selecting New Faculty," appeared in ADE, Bulletin of the Association of Departments of English (November, 1969), pp. 16-21. It concerned itself exclusively with candidates for positions in English departments.

winter 1974 379



them, or any other. He can distribute dittoed or mimeo-

graphed sheets, if he wishes. He can utilize audio-visual aids, but he should be cautioned that exclusive de-

pendence upon them (that is, a half-hour film covering the entire presentation) will not reveal very much about the candidate's teaching ability.

The recruiting officer (usually the department chairman, but it could be anyone whose task it is to arrange for the applicant's visit to the campus) should make every effort to allow the candidate to give his or her

presentation to a regularly scheduled class whose subject area comprehends that area, or one of those areas, which the applicant is being hired to teach. Very often the candidate can take over an introductory class for one lesson or part of one lesson in disciplines offering such courses. Sociology, history, political science, psychology, and the sciences are among those disciplines which often do. The material to be covered should be agreed upon in advance between the candidate and the faculty member directing the course. Sometimes the candidate can conduct a lesson in an advanced course, if the department will expect him to teach that subject matter later. Seminars can frequently be adapted to suit the class's interests and the candidate's expertise. If, however, the candidate's presentation can't be fitted into a scheduled class, then he could talk to a club formed of students in his discipline. What often happens is that none of the possibilities mentioned is practical. The recruiting officer and the candidate must jointly determine upon a time; the candidate, with some guidance, selects a topic; and the recruiting officer obtains a convenient room and then publicizes the presentation through notices in the college newspaper, on bulletin boards, announcements in ap- propriate classes, and so on. Everyone concerned at all with the quality of new faculty members - which should include faculty, students, and administration - should be invited to attend not only the specially organized presentations but also those which are part of scheduled classes. Every effort should be made to attract a large number of the faculty and student majors in the discipline of the candidate.

What should be the subject matter of the presentation? One which the candidate knows well, one which interests him or her, one which is likely to interest the audience, and one which he or she is being hired to teach. If he's going to teach environmental biology, he should not be encouraged to talk about experimental laboratory biology. If he will teach tests and measurements for the psychology department, his presentation should not con- centrate on social psychology. If he's supposed to be the English department's specialist in Chaucer, his presentation should not be on water imagery in three Victorian novelists. The candidate should be allowed to choose the level at which he wants to pitch his presentation where a special meeting has been convoked for it. In a class or seminar, he must recognize that one may be on a freshman level and the other a senior, and adjust his

presentation to suit that audience if, and only if, he feels that this type of audience is one with which he will be

comfortable and one which he will conceivably be teach-

ing. (The candidate should never be forced to address a

group with which he may not be comfortable and should never be forced to speak upon a subject he finds un-

congenial.) But if he makes a presentation to a special meeting probably attracting a heterogeneous mixture of

faculty, students, administrators, some familiar, some unfamiliar with the candidate's discipline, he should be allowed to establish a level. A sociology candidate should be able to say, "I'm designing this presentation for a

sophomore class in sociology which has had a general introductory course. I'm going to give the class its initial discussion on self and socialization." Or, a journalism candidate could say, "Let's imagine this is a junior course in newspaper reporting. The class has already learned the principles of covering and writing general news stories. I'm going to talk abo.ut covering a particular beat - city hall."

There is, however, in the choice of a candidate's topic, one important caveat: don't let the presentation be based on his or her dissertation or any phase closely related to it. The result, I have observed, is almost invariably unsatisfactory. The candidate knows the subject matter

thoroughly, no doubt, but rarely can he isolate those

parts which are of general interest and value. Many dissertations in the humanities, at least, are on recondite matters - on individuals who aren't really significant in most undergraduate curricula, and frequently not even in graduate curricula. Or they may deal with little known works of important writers, works the average student won't read and has probably never heard of. Dissertations sometimes take new and controversial attitudes toward well-known figures or theories, but most class discussions of them will rarely go beyond the traditional view. Too often candidates fresh from dissertations get hooked on minutiae, on bibliography, on refutation. To repeat a

hackneyed analogy, he is likely to spend a half hour

talking about one tree when the audience is hardly aware of the forest surrounding it. The candidate usually knows the material so thoroughly he cannot put himself in the

place of his auditors and the result is obscurity and tedium. On rare occasions the dissertation does lend itself to a fruitful presentation, but generally it is a good idea to discourage it in the strongest possible terms. It is more difficult to generalize about the use of dissertations for presentations in the sciences. Some departments feel that the ability to bring the usually highly specialized dissertation material down to a level where

junior and senior majors can understand it offers the kind of challenge which will reveal much about the candidate's teaching. A candidate for a position in a

chemistry department who wrote his dissertation on emis- sions of electrons would baffle almost all his audience, faculty included, were he to go into the high-powered mathematical background of his dissertation, but he could talk about the more general aspects of spectroscopy to

upper level chemistry majors. Some departments which are experiment-oriented like dissertations as presentation subjects because it enables them to evaluate the can-

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didate's grasp of research techniques, some of which he will be teaching to students.

As a revealing constituent of the presentation, the recruiting officer should solicit questions from the audience. If someone wants to pursue a point raised in the presentation, the recruiting officer should allow it, but if the point doesn't originate from the presentation, the candidate should be spared the necessity of a public response. He may elect to answer, of course, but the recruiting officer should insure that the professionalism of the presentation is maintained and should intercept any question that is not really germane to it. Once the questions and subsequent discussion have been concluded, the recruiting officer, whether the department faculty or the chairman has opted for a voluntary or obligatory opinion, should distribute a form asking whether each member attended the presentation and whether on the basis of it and any other factors the faculty member thinks the candidate should be tendered a contract, or whether final decision should be delayed until other candidates have made campus visits.

Note that the presentation is not meant to replace the other elements of the campus visit. Interested faculty and administration will continue to scrutinize the candidate's credentials carefully. Everyone will continue to have an opportunity to meet and talk to him or her privately or in a group. If a lunch or dinner with the applicant is an established part of the interviewing tradition, let it be preserved. Any other step the school regards as important need not be omitted. A bad presentation need not mean inevitably that a contract will not be offered. On a few occasions at Bradley a candidate's other attributes were strong enough to overcome an unimpressive performance.

What are the advantages of the presentation as part of a hiring procedure? It enables the candidate who purports to be a professional to perform professionally. It enables the faculty, who have performed professionally, who know something about teaching through experience, reflection, and perhaps through training and read- ing, to judge the candidate in a dimension not previously available to them. Although it is certainly true that most - but far from all - candidates will display some nervousness at the beginning of the presentation, this nervousness usually wears off rapidly. If the candidate doesn't succeed in reducing it or conquering it entirely as he or she proceeds, the question may well arise in the auditors whether he or she will be able to teach with confidence in front of his or her own classes. The audience is tolerant of the different manifestations of stage fright which at first may be audible and visible. But whatever the stress under which the candidate labors, many qualities of good teaching will come through. His voice, despite a tremor or two, will be the same as in his own classroom. An irritating nasality, a rate of speech so fast that it defies comprehension or note-taking, or a rate of speech so slow as to become soporific will come through. Whatever physical traits he may possess, annoying or endearing, cannot be entirely disguised, nor can a sense of humor. An ability to organize and present material

clearly and coherently will come through. An ability to answer questions, to field disagreements, to allow for contrary opinions, to avoid going out on a limb will come through. So will his familiarity with technical and foreign terms in his discipline. Granted that one presentation is not enough to make a definitive evaluation of someone's teaching, but surely it is much better to have some awareness of a candidate's teaching ability than none at all.

Another advantage is that it impresses upon the candidate the school's genuine concern for teaching. "You people really care about teaching," one candidate told me. "I do, too," he added. Another candidate who had been tendered contracts by Bradley as well as by several other schools, wrote, "Apparently you do more than pay lip service to teaching. I'd like to be associated with such a university."

Still another advantage is that it can lead to an im- provement in teaching both in the candidate and at the institution itself. After gathering the reactions to the presentation, many of them handed to the recruiting officer shortly after it, the recruiting officer frequently is able to make useful suggestions about the candidate's teaching. Equally as important, other faculty members in attendance will sometimes learn new methods, reassess techniques of their own which they find unsuccessful when employed by the candidate. They often ask questions of the candidate not only about the subject matter but about the ways of teaching it. "Why," they have wondered aloud, "did you introduce the subject in this way?" Or, "Why did you allow that question to lead you off the main subject? Wouldn't it have been better to tell the student to hold the question for a few minutes and finish what you wanted to say?" Others will vigorously defend the value of spontaneous questions and animated debate will follow. Talking about how best to use dittoed sheets, how to maintain interest in a lecture which is starting to bore students, how to use the blackboard effectively can benefit everyone, not just the candidate. Many faculty members who could not be induced to participate in a teaching methods discussion designated as such, eagerly join in just such a discussion as part of a presentation.

What are the disadvantages of the presentation? Minimal, to my way of thinking. One complaint is that you don't get a true picture of the candidate's teaching ability by listening to him or her once. I have already given my response: you get some picture, which is infinitely superior to none at all. A further complaint is that the candidate is too nervous to give a representative performance. There is some merit in this complaint, but I have already pointed out that faculty members are very generous in making allowances for such nervousness. And the nervousness certainly should not pervade other aspects of teaching: a good outline, the clear develop- ment of a central idea with sufficient examples, perhaps a summation of what has been taught - these are pre- pared well in advance and, one would think, very carefully and are not subject to nervousness. They can be

winter 1974 381



judged independent of the tension surrounding the presentation. As I have intimated earlier, many candidates are not nervous at all. In fact, some welcome a chance to demonstrate their ability in what is, after all, their chosen profession. Several candidates have told me they enjoyed the presentation. "It's like an actor getting a chance to show his wares - an audition of sorts," one informed me. "I think I am a pretty damn good teacher. I'm glad you gave me an opportunity to show it." Others have stressed the analogy between teaching and acting. "In my opinion," one young woman said, "teaching is a

performing art. Most good teachers are performers. There's a lot of ham in all of us. We appreciate an audience."

A third frequent objection is that too much depends upon a single presentation. But I think I have already answered this. The presentation is part of a procedure, and should be so regarded; it is not the entire procedure itself.

Finally, let me attempt to respond to two more ob- jections to the presentation. Both, I think, are minor. One is that faculty members who are notorious for their inability to agree upon anything will give such con-

flicting opinions after viewing a presentation that the recruiting officer will have no consensus to help guide him in a recommendation. Experience has demonstrated that there is a remarkable uniformity of judgment, even among the most diverse faculty members. We at Bradley seemed to be able to recognize when somebody had done well or when somebody had done poorly. We did not always agree upon the desirability of tendering a contract to a candidate, but very seldom did some faculty members label as very good a performance that somebody else called very bad. The last objection or disadvantage hardly obtains any more. It is that promising candidates, seeking to avoid the "ordeal" of a presentation, would not apply for a position which required one. However, very few declined an invitation to the Bradley campus on that score. None, of course, ever declared that to be the reason. Today the job market is such that I would not anticipate anyone's losing an opportunity to obtain a position because he feared a presentation. I think it is not too much for a college which invests sometimes many hundreds of dollars bringing a candidate to the campus to ask him or her to help that college arrive at an intel- ligent, discriminating selection by making a presentation.

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The Presentation: Testing Potential New Faculty's Ability to Teach