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Teaching and Tenure

© Chelsea Paige Buffington

At most institutions, teaching is an important part of tenure, so how do you get good responses to your teaching. There are numerous things you should do as a teacher that brings you the respect of your students and colleagues. Be available--hold office hours on a regular basis with multiple hours. Make your course requirements clear from the beginning of the semester both in your syllabi and in statements during the first week of class. Be open to discussion by students both in class and during office hours. Have a number of graded assignments to allow for improvements and anomalies. Be flexible. Allow students to discuss alternative assignments. Get feedback. You may want to have a mid-semester evaluation to tell you what your students are responding well to and what is not working.

Obviously these tips may not all be possible. If you are teaching at a large institution, large classes mean heavy grading loads therefore making numerous assignments an impossibility. It also means that individual interaction with students is more difficult. Perhaps the best tip for a larger institution is to be knowledgeable, open, and entertaining.

There are many resources for teachers available on the Internet. The Organization of American Historians has an area on teaching on its web-site, http://www.indiana.edu/~oah The American Historical Association's newsletter, Perspectives, also often carries articles on teaching. It is at least partially available online for members of the organization, http://www.theaha.org Humanities Net, H-Net, also carries an area on teaching on their web-site, http://www.h-net.msu.edu/teaching At http://www.eriche.org/new/letter1.html you can subscribe to the National Teaching & Learning Forum. George Mason University runs History Matters that includes discussions on the U.S. History Survey, http://historymatters.gmu.edu The Library of Congress has a site entitled American Memory that includes collections relevant to American History at http://memory.loc.gov

Other good resources include online syllabi, individual faculty web-sites that often include teaching philosophies, as well as books on teaching. There are numerous ways to find online syllabi and faculty web-sites including simple searches on http://www.altavista.com and http://www.yahoo.com A good site for online syllabi is Higher Education Syllabi Online at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/sylllabi/hist.... Books on the subject include The Academic Career Handbook by Loraine Blaxter, Christina Hughes, and Malcolm Tight that was published by Open University Press in 1998; Charon A. Baicoco amd Jamie N. Dewaters's Successful College Teaching: Problem-Solving Strategies of Distinguished Professors that was published by Allyn & Bacon in 1998; and The Intelligent Professor's Guide to Teaching edited by David W. Champagne published by ROC Ed Tech Publishing in 1995. For more books look at http://www.amazon.com

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