As you may recall, my department is conducting a search for a TT line in a language that is not Spanish. In fact, it is a language that I know nothing about. So the finalists have already been decided, and have been invited for campus interviews. As a member of the search committee, I am supposed to attend the teaching demonstration, in an "Advanced Language" class. I would bail out since I doubt I could be very useful not understanding a word of what is being said, but the problem is that there is only one faculty in the department who teaches the language, and maybe an additional one who can comprehend it. So I have to go.
Has anybody ever attended such a teaching demonstration? Do you have any suggestions about how to make my observation as productive as possible? Things I could look for, to give me clues of whether the candidate is good in the class or not. I remember every teaching demonstration I gave, and since you do not know the students, they will always be pretty quiet, no matter how cheerful you are. So I would hate to evaluate somebody based only on student apparent interest.
I've done this for pedagogy classes and other types of work. You look for things like do they have a plan, do they have activities, do they use the target language, how much time to they spend on each activity, does there appear to be a set up and conclusion, do they look like they interact well with students in groupwork or do they just watch them, do they answer student questions, do they use the board or another way of presenting information in multiple ways, etc. Obviously you need to check your impressions with someone who does understand the language, but you can tell a lot.
ReplyDeleteI've also been on the other side of this, for departmental evaluations as well as job searches (in one I had more observers than students, most of whom did not speak the language). I can say that when people are skilled observers, they do know what's going on (at least based on what they told me) even if they don't know the language, so you'll probably be finer than you think.
Thanks, your comments are incredibly helpful. Now I know what to look for better. A reflection I have is that, if you are on the other side (as a job candidate), part of your luck may depend on the how skilled or not an observer is. In Spanish it is usually not a problem, since there is always more than one professor, but lesser taught languages can be a challenge.
ReplyDeleteGood luck on your search!