B. Teaching

Teaching has always been central to the expectations of faculty at small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and teaching universities. In recent years, teaching has also become more important at research institutions. The type and number of courses you teach, the proficiency with which you teach them, and the number of students that you advise are the components used to evaluate your teaching.

1. Courses

Under ideal circumstances, the courses you teach will be closely related to your research expertise. However, this is not the most common situation in most departments. More typically, you will have courses that are closely aligned with your research expertise, and you may have to teach service courses for the department and university. Thus, your teaching load and the teaching course mix determines how much overlap there will be across teaching and research expertise. For example, if all the courses you teach are not related to your research interests, teaching these courses will exact a heavier burden than if all courses were directly related to your research expertise (i.e., reading two areas of empirical literature versus reading only one body of literature for course preparation and research/grant preparation).

You should negotiate and renegotiate teaching loads and course assignments so that you will be able to teach most of the same courses for several years and, thus, minimize new preparations. Typically, new course preparations for untenured faculty members during their first 3 years in academia can be overwhelming and monopolize time that should be spent on research projects and grants.

2. Student advisees

In all departments you will be expected to advise students. The kind of advising that is expected depends on the institution. In research institutions (which typically focus on graduate education), your advising will probably be limited to theses (senior or honors undergraduate and master's) and dissertations (doctoral). You may also be expected to advise undergraduate psychology majors on their courses of study. Appointment to departmental faculty does not automatically translate into an appointment to graduate faculty (which allows you to sit on graduate students' committees and/or be a major advisor to a graduate student). Clarify this, then seek such appointment if you did not negotiate this at the time of your hiring.

In 4-year institutions, student advising will be more focused on undergraduate programs of study advising and helping to prepare students for graduate or professional study. Faculty may also have the opportunity to advise senior or honors theses.

In 2-year programs at community/junior colleges, the focus is primarily on helping to prepare students for transfer to a 4-year institution. Advisors will be expected to help students prepare academically as well as to negotiate the application and transfer process. As many nontraditional students often attend a 2-year institution first, advising may also emphasize helping returning students re-orient to the academic environment and refine their time-management skills.

If you are the only woman and/or ethnic minority in your department or area, you will likely be sought out by many women and ethnic minority students for mentoring, advice, and emotional support. These activities can be rewarding because, just as you needed mentoring by someone more experienced, so do the many women and ethnic minority students who are likely to seek you out.

Many women and ethnic minority faculty feel a strong desire to meet these expectations because of needs they reflect. Such commitments can, however, be a quagmire, because too much committee work and student advising will likely impair your teaching preparation and research productivity. In some departments your peers will expect you to serve all students, and your attention to either women or ethnic minorities will be seen as a disservice to other students. In other departments, you will be expected to serve only or mostly women or ethnic minority students. If such departments marginalize these same students, your involvement with them will marginalize you as well. In either case, time that you commit to unacknowledged mentoring is time that is not spent on activities that would bring you closer to tenure or promotion. You must confront this conflict directly and work out an appropriate solution. Discussion regarding this issue with your own mentor(s) will be helpful.

3. Teaching evaluations

Variations in emphasis on teaching versus research may exist within the same university. Studies have shown that even when both teaching and research are considered important, success in research is often given a greater emphasis during tenure and promotion evaluations (Kasten, 1984).

Many institutions use student teaching evaluations as part of any promotion decision. Teaching evaluations provide useful information for course improvement. Even if not heavily weighted, negative teaching ratings may hurt your chances of promotion and tenure. Excellent student evaluations, however, will not be sufficient in and of themselves for gaining tenure. Many universities require untenured faculty members to evaluate every course they teach.

One recommended strategy is to have teaching evaluations by peers and students in the middle of the semester so that you can address any deficiencies before a final evaluation (Gibbons, 1986). Seek early evaluations of your performance, preferably after the first year, but no later than the second. You should conduct evaluations yearly to keep informed about your status. Be aware of the research that addresses the biases related to gender (Basow, etc., Langbein, 1996) and grading patterns (Greenwald, 1996) that affect student evaluation results. Similar research is not available about biases toward ethnic minority faculty.

Anecdotal reports from ethnic minority and women faculty members indicate that students sometimes react to these faculty with expectations of less competency. As ethnic minority and women faculty are often the ones that integrate the most diversity material into the course work, some have found that students who fail to understand diversity feel that too much attention is paid to these issues. This may be reflected in student evaluations of courses. It is important that students be encouraged to include written comments on evaluation forms. In this way, if course evaluations are low, and the student indicates that this is because of the inclusion of too much diversity material, the faculty member can address the ratings in annual faculty evaluations and promotion and tenure packets.

One advantage of having both peer and student evaluations is that peer evaluations may counterbalance negative student evaluations and vice versa. If available, peer evaluations can be particularly useful for obtaining feedback on your teaching from colleagues with special expertise in presentation skills (e.g., experts in speech and communication or in education and learning).