S4xE16: Teaching Faculty Hiring
Episode Summary
Hiring teaching faculty lacks strong community norms, creating a heavy burden on candidates and costs for departments. In this episode, we talk with Michael Hilton from Carnegie Mellon University about a Computing Research Association (CRA) memo he co-authored called Best Practices for Hiring Teaching Faculty in Research Computing Departments. We discuss the practical consequences of this lack of norms, how departments can make hiring better for candidates so they can put their best foot forward, and how to better assess candidates. While the memo is full of useful guidance, this episode adds nuance and stories to make teaching-faculty hiring better for all of us.
You can also download this episode directly.
Episode Notes
Best Practices for Hiring Teaching Faculty in Research Computing Departments. (2024). Jennifer Campbell (University of Toronto), Mark Floryan (University of Virginia), Geoffrey Herman (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Michael Hilton (Carnegie Mellon University), and Jérémie Lumbroso (University of Pennsylvania). Computing Research Association (CRA).
CS pedagogy class for PhD students at CMU
Sowing the Seeds for Teaching-Focused Careers in Computing. (2026, February). Matt Hazenbush (Computing Research Association). Computing Research Association (CRA).
Transcript
[00:01] Kristin: Hello and welcome to the CS-Ed podcast, a podcast where we talk about teaching computer science with computer science educators. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, an Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University. Joining me today is Michael Hilton, teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[01:31] Michael: Well, thank you for having me.
[00:02] Kristin: So, Michael, today’s topic is on teaching faculty and hiring practices. But first, I’d like to ask you, how did you get to where you are today? I want to normalize that not everyone took a direct path to where we are now.
[00:33] Michael: Yeah, well, thanks for asking. I’m very proud of the fact that I have an extra degree that most of my colleagues don’t have. So, I have an Associate’s of Science degree, which means I started out at a community college. So, I was actually homeschooled, K through 12 or K through 11-ish. And then my first day of traditional schooling was at a community college, Grossmont Community College in, outside of San Diego, California. And I went to community college for 2 years, and then I went to, I transferred to San Diego State via a transfer agreement guarantee, which is a fantastic program. And then I got a job working for the Department of Defense as a civil servant. So, I was a practicing software engineer for almost 10 years. And at the end of that time, I had worked on some pretty cool projects. I built a system that then President Obama said was cool. So, you know, my life is all downhill from there.
Michael: I had kind of maxed out the technical track at the government lab that I was at. And I realized that I was a very strong mediocre engineer, as I like to put it, that I could do the work, but I didn’t love sitting behind a computer all day. And what I really, really enjoyed was mentoring new hires, mentoring junior engineers. And so it came time to think about, well, do I want to spend the rest of my life, you know, at this same job in the same lab, driving the same street every day, or do I want to do something different? And I thought, well, what I really like is working with people, working with students, working with, you know, interns, junior engineers, and so, I really kind of thought that teaching might be something I might like.
Michael: So, I went and took a leave of absence and got a master’s degree at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where my parents are both from, and I was able to teach a class there as an adjunct after finishing my master’s, and I absolutely loved it, and so then I went on and got a PhD at Oregon State University. And then I graduated from there, and I got it, and then I was kind of comparing tracks of whether I wanted to go. At that point, it wasn’t, I didn’t understand about different, you know, academic tracks. I knew I wanted to teach, but I just kind of assumed I would be a traditional professor. But as I learned more about teaching track positions or teaching-focused positions, this really kind of hit all of my like, life goals. And so I was able to get a job at Carnegie Mellon as an assistant teaching professor. And then now I’m a, you know, teaching professor. I’ve been promoted to full teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon.
[02:51] Kristin: Awesome. So was your master’s degree also in computer science?
[02:55] Michael: All of my degrees are in computer science except for the associate’s, yes.
[02:59] Kristin: OK.
[03:01] Michael: That is a bit of a fun story that the associate’s I had a general science associate’s degree, and they didn’t offer computer science at this community college in the last millennium. So, the, I transferred to San Diego State. We had to transfer. We had physical cards we had to fill out. And so I looked at all the majors and was like, well, I like computers, and they have jobs, I hear. So I checked the box. So I was a junior in computer science at San Diego State, and I’ve taken 0 computer science classes in my entire life.
[03:30] Kristin: Wow.
[03:31] Michael: So it was a little bit of a crazy couple of years. I had to take everything concurrently that I could. So I took CS1 and CS2 the same semester. And, yeah, it was interesting. And, but, you know, I made it through it only one extra semester because, you know, San Diego State. And so, but I’m, I eventually, you know, made it out and then learned a lot on the job, I would say.
[03:54] Kristin: I’m just like, I’m trying to imagine a student like trying to do CS1 and CS2 at the same time.
[04:02] Michael: I mean, you asked me my path, not the optimal path. In retrospect, as a faculty member, this is not what I would recommend students do.
[04:08] Kristin: Yes, yes. It’s fascinating how, like students, both listen and don’t listen to us at the same time.
[04:15] Michael: I’m doing exit interviews with some advisees, and one of them said, well, the students want to take too many advanced classes. And I said, well, is there anything I could say as an advisor that would encourage students not to try to rush to take all the advanced classes? And the student very honestly said, “No, I don’t think so.” I appreciate your honesty.
[04:34] Kristin: Sometimes I love that, but we’re gonna focus instead on the topic of the day, which is the Computing Research Association’s memo that you helped author called Hiring Teaching faculty in Research Computing departments, mainly focusing on best practices. So, before we get into like, what’s in the memo, and spoiler alert, we’re not gonna have time to like cover everything, but we’ll cover a good chunk of it. But what’s the history of the memo? Like, how did it come about? Like, why did you all feel that this memo needed to exist?
[05:03] Michael: Yeah, so the need for the memo came about from several of us having conversations and realizing that there was a gap that we thought we could hopefully help fill. And the identification of the gap came from basically our personal experiences and conversations we have with other people in the industry. And we all kind of agreed. So I can kind of just share maybe some of the ways that this gap has impacted me personally. Although all the other authors have kind of similar stories, I would say. So, it kind of goes back to when I was doing a PhD at Oregon State. I talked to my advisor about being interested in teaching track. And he said, I have no idea what that looks like. I can’t help you at all. That was the answer he gave me.
[05:43] Kristin: OK.
[05:44] Michael: And so the year before I was going to graduate, I found on some mailing list, a teaching track position advertised at Penn University, and it was being advertised by a faculty member named Chris Murphy, who is a fantastic person.
[05:57] Kristin: Yes!
[05:57] Michael: And I called him up and was like, “Hey, I’m not ready for this job. But you’re the only person I’ve ever seen advertising a job that I actually want. What would I need to do to be competitive for this kind of job in a year from now, when I’m ready to graduate?” And he very graciously took the time to look at my resume. We had a maybe a 45-minute conversation on the phone, and he gave me some very specific advice about what I could do in the next year to be better prepared for a teaching track position. And when I came out, I was very well prepared. But this happened because Chris, out of the goodness of his heart, took time out of his busy schedule to help me, and this is not a systemic way to help the industry as a whole, right? But then fast forward to my time at CMU, and I now am part of hiring committees where we’re looking to hire more teaching track faculty.
Michael: And also in addition, maybe I should point out, I also teach a CS pedagogy class for PhD students at CMU who are looking to go on the market. So, I write a lot of letters. I support a lot of students who are going on the market, and probably every year there’s one or two alumni from our class, generally that are on the market that I meet with and advise regularly. I write letters for, I support, and I’ve done this for maybe 5 or 6 years. So, I’ve seen a lot of people go on the market from the student perspective. Plus, I’ve also been the chair of hiring committees looking for candidates, from that perspective.
Michael: And I think really what it boils down to, if I had to point to one big problem, is that there is a lot of for, so I don’t like the term teaching and tenure track because I think those terms obfuscate the real differences. But if we think of tenure track as kind of the traditional track in academia that has long existed, there are community norms around what a teaching track hiring process looks like. So, these don’t all need to be thoroughly documented because by and large, they are something that everyone is aware that these community norms exist, and almost all hiring processes adhere to the community norms or are explicit in the ways that they diverge from the community norms, right?
Michael: And in fact, when I was a PhD student, a lot of people gave me advice like, “Well, if you were applying for a tenure track job, I would know what to tell you. But for teaching track, I don’t.” Right? And this points to the fact that there is no community norms for a teaching track, teaching-focused career. And so the lack of community norms means that these processes by and large are getting reinvented at every institution, sometimes for every position.
[08:26] Kristin: Yes.
[08:27] Michael: And there’s a lot of cost to the institutions and to the candidates because of this. When I was on the job market, I limited myself to 4 interviews because all 4 required different job talks. And so I had to develop 4 different job talks as a teaching-focused faculty member, even though some of the jobs had, quote unquote, tenure and some of the jobs didn’t, but they were all teaching-focused positions. And so this lack of community norms, I think, has a massive cost for candidates and actually for committees as well.
Michael: And so the goal of this white paper is to try to suggest for the industry to coalesce around some norms. And there are reasons why any school may deviate from those norms. But if there’s a general sense of what the norms are, and deviations are specifically considered as opposed to kind of randomly occurring, I think it would be better for everyone, both candidates and for hiring committees.
[09:16] Kristin: Yes, I, I definitely remember when I was on the market, I interviewed maybe at 6 places, maybe it was 7, and I feel like every talk was different. And like, I could reuse some pieces, but definitely not all pieces. And so, what I had to do around the talk was different for every single one. And I was just kind of like, this is a huge burden. And I remember complaining about it a lot after I’d landed my job for a couple of years after. And had opinions when I also served on committees.
[09:45] Michael: Yeah, I mean, this is, I, so I was given a topic that I had to talk about inheritance for one lecture. I was asked to talk about my research, but aimed at an undergraduate audience. I was asked to talk about, give a teaching demo of something that I could teach to faculty that they might not already know, right? So these are all kind of wildly divergent requirements, which means I had to spend a lot of time coming up with these individual talks, right, versus a traditionally, a more tenure track talk is, quote unquote, the best talk of your life, and people practice it for months and months and months, and is incredibly polished.
Michael: And so this creates challenges, especially when it comes time to assessing, because you’re assessing someone who is on their 5th talk in 4 weeks, that they’ve been told what they need to talk about versus someone who spends, you know, 5 to 6 years of their life on the topic in the last 6 months polishing this talk up, like no talk they’ve ever given before. And so if you’re expecting the the super polished thing for someone who’s getting all these random talks they have to prepare kind of, you know, in a short time frame for the interview, this creates some real assessment challenges and leads it to seem like teaching-focused candidates are less good or less qualified when really it’s just a structure of the interview process and not about the quality of the candidates themselves.
[11:01] Kristin: All right. So, before, I feel like we talked a lot about the job talk part. So, potentially, we will skip talking about that, which is in the memo, if people want more details on that. The thing that I want to first cover is more of a framework or attitude or like the big picture that I think departments should approach this with, because I feel like it’s more helpful to start with like an overall framework that will give people something to like, hang on to or hang different pieces to, for lack of a better way of putting it. Does that make sense?
[11:36] Michael: Yeah, so I think the big picture here is this idea that because tenure track has community norms, candidates are allowed and encouraged to optimize for kind of what the process will look like before they even know which schools are going to interview at. And if you are running a teaching track search, there is value in letting the candidate have extra like prepare their best opportunity to show you what kind of candidate they can be. And so, I think a lot of schools end up with these kind of bespoke hiring practices because they have some reason why they think that this is a good approach, and they’re probably right that there is good approaches there, but they maybe aren’t cognizant of the fact of what the candidates are losing and therefore what the whole market loses when candidates can’t optimize because everything is every process is bespoke.
Michael: And so, I think maybe some schools would do well, especially from the hiring side, to consider the pool of candidates as a whole and consider the candidate experience. And maybe there’s opportunities to have your process not be quite as amazing as it could be, but be more adherent to community norms in a way that allows a kind of a larger pool of candidates to consider your position because it fits in kind of with other positions. And so think about that maybe the pool as a whole and not your distinct school, and what is the absolute most overfitted process for your institution.
[13:09] Kristin: I think another potential addition to that framing is that by more aligning yourself with norms and being careful about when you’re deviating, you’re providing that candidate the opportunity to put their best foot forward. And if you didn’t do that, you might miss out on someone who could be amazing, but happened to have interviews so close together that they couldn’t prepare well enough for your bespoke talk requirements, and so they come off as way worse than they actually would have been when you hire them.
[13:39] Michael: I completely agree. Or even worse, is usually the best candidates are the ones that are self-aware of their strengths and limitations. This is a characteristic that correlates with someone being competent and smart and capable in real life. And so, the people who know they aren’t going to be able to do a job on the interview are likely to just turn down the interview completely, right? Or maybe they have competing requirements. And so you’re narrowing your pool of potential candidates that you even get to evaluate, and then the evaluation is less strong, as you mentioned already.
[14:07] Kristin: Yeah. All right. So, let’s dive into some nitty-gritty details. Let’s start with the job ad. What did the memo say about the job ad?
[14:18] Michael: So again, there’s going to be a lot of trends here that kind of all go back to this idea that there is no community norms. And so you should be aware of that. And so for the job ad, for example, there are many things that are taken for granted in a more traditional job ad that aren’t explicitly laid out because they can be easily assumed as a community norm, right? And so, like, for example, one thing is it is not uniform across teaching-focused positions, what degrees are required, what degrees are expected, what degrees are desired, right? So there is a whole range of shades there, right? So there are places that would like the candidates to have a PhD but will settle for a master’s. There are places that are more than happy for a candidate to have a master’s and don’t really care if they have a PhD. And there are places that demand a PhD and won’t consider a candidate with a master’s. And the point of this white paper is not to take a stand on what is the right degree for a teaching-focused faculty to have, but to point out that since there’s not community norms about that, your job ad should be very explicit in terms of what are the exact degree requirements for this specific position.
Michael: And be more explicit about that, you know, is this, does this need to be in a specific area or not? How much experience do you want someone to have lots of, you know, some teaching? It seems that this correlates a lot with places that have medical schools, but they often call their teaching-track professors of practice. And so is there an actual practice requirement? Do candidates need to have actually been a practicing engineer to candidate to qualify for a professor of practice of position is not clear to a candidate, right? And there’s not clear community norms about that. So, the point here is not to try to describe what your position in any institution should look like, but to talk, kind of, highlight the things that are unclear because there’s not a community norm. And so your job ads should be more explicit about some of these things that maybe could just be assumed in a more traditional tenure track ad.
[16:19] Kristin: So, I think one way to sum that up is, you cannot assume that in your job ad that people can read between the lines, cause there’s no norms telling you how to read between the lines.
[17:11] Michael: Correct. And there’s things that the candidate has no visibility into, right? Like, what sort of job security do you provide? Are you on a 1-year contract, 3-year contracts, 5-year contracts? Does the position have indefinite employment? Does it not have indefinite employment, right? There, these positions are all over the map on these sorts of things, and there’s no way to even find that information out, usually from outside the institution, right? And so being thoughtful about, well, what would a candidate want to know, and what is it unreasonable for them to assume, like job security, it’s unreasonable for them to assume any of those values for a teaching-focused position. So you should therefore explicitly say that. And we have a whole bullet point list in the job ad that I’m not gonna read here. I’ll point people to the paper for that. But these sorts of things is the idea.
[17:11] Kristin: Yeah, thinking back to when I was on the market, I was like, I don’t think any of the job ads I read had any insight into how long the contracts were or anything like that. I think they did, they would advertise if it was a long-term employment or a like tenure equivalent kind of job. But then again, only the UC system really had that at the time. So, you could kind of infer to a certain extent.
Kristin: All right, so next up, evaluating the candidate. What did the memo say?
[17:43] Michael: So, in some ways, this was the section that maybe was the least teaching focus specific, and in general, these are somewhat just best practices for all hiring across all types of positions. But I think there’s some dynamics that make these particularly relevant to teaching in track, right? So one of the big things that we advocate for is the idea of having rubrics to evaluate candidates against, and these rubrics should be developed a priori before any candidate is seen. And they should be thoughtful about what are the actual requirements of this specific position, right? So if you are, for example, I have colleagues, you mentioned UC, right? I have colleagues at the UC system who have positions that are relatively similar to mine, but yet they’re teaching, they have TAs, or they have TA staffs that are bigger than the enrollment in some of my courses, right? And so this is a different kind of type of position that’s really more about management, and like your upper-level management at that point, you’re not even middle-level management at that point.
[18:48] Kristin: Yes. (laugh)
[18:49] Michael: Versus, you know, we have, we have well-staffed classes, but they’re much smaller because we’re a private institution. So, you know, we have a staff of 5 to 10 TAs, and you still have to manage the staff, but it’s very different than managing a staff of 80 to 100 TAs, right? So, you know, what do we need to evaluate the person’s, like, upper-level management skills for this position or not, right? This varies across institutions.
Michael: One reason this is particularly important is that it is very common for there to be a mixture of teaching-focused and non-teaching-focused, particularly research-focused, faculty on a hiring committee. And the way a research-focused faculty evaluates a candidate versus the way a teaching-focused candidate evaluates a candidate, or teaching-focused faculty evaluates a candidate, or maybe the way a research candidate should be evaluated and the way a teaching candidate should be evaluated are quite different because the jobs are quite different. And a rubric can be a really great way to get people on board with what do we actually care about for this position and what should we actually be looking for.
Michael: Vision is really important for a research-focused candidate. You know, if you’re going to be, if you’re hiring someone to teach your CS1 class with, you know, literally 1,000 students every semester, right? Like, evaluating their vision for the future, like it’s good for them to have vision, but that’s not the primary skill you should be evaluating on if you’re, if you’re hiring someone for that position, right? It’s much more of management skills and things like this that are not necessarily relevant to a research-focused position. So many of us have seen situations where there are challenges at the when it comes time to hiring someone because there’s such a big divergence between what people on the committee think they’re looking for in evaluating a candidate. And so a rubric can be a really great way to do this. It also helps reduce bias so that the one candidate who smiles a lot and, you know, comes in and is dressed super nicely is maybe not given a huge boost over someone who maybe just doesn’t look quite as good or isn’t as tall or doesn’t meet any of the demographic characteristics that people expect or whatever, right? So, there’s basically a lot of benefits to having rubrics and almost no downsides, is what we argue.
[20:57] Kristin: Yes, I completely agree. Whenever I’m on a committee, I’m usually like, so what’s the rubric? Like, I am assuming that it exists or it will exist. Do you think the rubric, or at least like hints of the rubric, should appear in the job ad?
[21:11] Michael: I think it’s fantastic if people can have their committees organized to the point where they can do that.
[21:16] Kristin: Yeah
[21:17] Michael: It would be ideal if you could, I mean, the stronger, I mean, a job process is really a matching process, right? And I always tell my students who are going on the job market that you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you. And I think we often culturally focus on the power dynamic of the interviewer as having the power and the interviewee as not having the power, but the interviewee has a lot of power in these situations, too.
Michael: And what I personally believe the goal is that you’re trying to look for the best match between the best candidate for this position and this position, finding the best candidate for it, and there can be really strong candidates who just aren’t a great match for a given position, and they’re going to be a better match somewhere else. And I hope that those candidates would not say yes to us, and they would go to the position that is better for them, right? And so, the rubric is yet another way to distill what really matters to you about the position. And so, if you include that in the job ad, or at least if you include the process of coming up with the rubric and make those same ideas, put those ideas in the job ad, then you’re helping create clarity, which is going to help create a better match between the candidate and the position.
[22:23] Kristin: Yeah, I, it’s definitely for me, like, I think in an ideal world, the committee would sit down and come up with the rubric first, and then use the rubric to help them write the job ad. But I, we’ve both been on committees enough to know that that’s not quite how it happens usually. It’s like, what was last time’s job ad? Let’s tweak that so that it’s up to date in the sense of whatever definition of up to date the committee has in the 10-30 minutes they have to, like, update the ad before it goes out.
[22:50] Michael: I will say that there’s a fantastic opportunity here, though, which is that if you’re part of a hiring committee, and the hiring committee doesn’t have a rubric, I completely agree with you that what will happen next year is if there is a rubric from last year, the rubric will be copied over and reuse the same rubric from last year. So, if you’re in a situation where there is no rubric, putting time and effort into the rubric, even after candidates have started coming to campus, can have a huge reoccurring value because it is likely the next time a search happens, they will just open up that same rubric and use that as a starting point. So, being thoughtful about how you can create the time and effort you put into creating a rubric this year can help seed the search next time with a good rubric. I think it’s worth thinking about and worth realizing that that is a leverage of power that a lot of academics don’t necessarily realize they have. And you could be a junior person creating the rubric this year and have a huge amount of influence over what happens in the next search because people will just copy and paste your rubric from last time.
[23:50] Kristin: That’s, I feel like that’s assuming that they’ll remember the rubric existed and will copy it over. And I feel like, I’m sure that happens at institutions where they are like, basically hiring every year, but I feel like teaching track does not often get a line every single year, especially at a lot of institutions. And so that’s relying on a level of institutional knowledge that, I don’t know if that piece of knowledge managed to stay alive until like the next job ad goes out. Unless, for example, that rubric appears in like the general faculty meeting and is clearly emphasized so that everyone in the faculty kind of remembers that the last time we evaluated this this kind of candidate, we were using a rubric. But, I aspire to live in a world like that someday.
[24:39] Michael: I mean, just internally in our department, we have a Google Drive where everyone puts all the hiring stuff, and then whoever gets tapped next time, they just go back to that Google Drive and open everything up and see what they did last time. So, we try to maximize copy and pasting as a faculty because we’re lazy, but you know, there’s benefits to that as well.
[24:55] Kristin: Yes, there are benefits to that. All right, so in the memo, there’s the next part in the memo after evaluating candidates is the job talk, but I feel like we talked about that enough. So let’s move on to…
[25:05] Michael: Can I say one thing about the job talk?
[25:06] Kristin: Yes, sure.
[25:07] Michael: So we talked a lot about kind of the cost to candidates to have developed all these different job talks, but there’s one thing that we didn’t talk about that I want to kind of mention explicitly that we talk about in the memo. The I think there is a community norm around job talks that I actually think is harmful. And so I want to address this, which is this idea that oftentimes, I would say maybe the median or the modal job talk for a teaching-focused position is, the prompt is, either here is a topic or choose your own topic, but come and teach a group of faculty as if they were students. This is probably the like default way that these talks happen. And I think this is particularly bad for several reasons, and I want to explicitly call these out.
[25:55] Kristin: Okay.
[25:55] Michael: So, if you’re evaluating someone’s teaching ability, having them give a lecture to a group of faculty, who already know this stuff very well, is a bad metric for someone’s ability to teach people who don’t know this topic well, I would argue. There also, there is this dynamic that occurs in the room that half the faculty already know this topic top to bottom, and they pop open their laptops, and they start doing email during the job talk, during the teaching part of the demo part of the job talk, because they’re bored, because everyone knows inheritance backwards and forwards, right? Then the other half of the faculty sit there and try to come up with a gotcha question that they can ask the instructor or the candidate about something about some deep down in the bowels of inheritance. What about this one super weird edge case? And they’re either doing this to kind of show off or to maybe like, they’re trying to come up with a question, but it’s hard for them to put themselves in a position of a, you know, a student that put themselves in the position they were in 30 years ago of what it’s like to not really understand inheritance. So maybe they’re doing this inadvertently. Maybe they’re trying to kind of show off to the room, right? I’m not trying to necessarily impugn negative motives to them.
Michael: But it leads to this really toxic dynamic where half the faculty are not paying attention and the other half come up with these really weird edge cases that no reasonable student would ever ask in a lecture on inheritance. And if the candidate is in a very stressful situation, giving a job talk to then be bombarded by these, like, super weird edge cases, or have the people not paying attention, if they’re trying to do active learning, like I’ve never seen active learning go well in a job talk because the faculty refused to participate. Everybody in the room, it’s hard to get everybody in the room for faculty to participate in an active learning exercise because they’re faculty and they already know all this stuff, right? And so the things that are good for a candidate, are not great for a, you know, this environment doesn’t create a realistic environment and it has some really negative artifacts, I would argue, that make the candidate look not nearly as good if they can’t answer this really weird esoteric deep down in the bowels question about some edge case that is purely there as a gotcha question, or if everybody’s tuned out on their laptops doing email, right?
[28:22] Kristin: Yeah, I can see all of that happening. I think for me, the thing that comes to mind is how, as a teaching faculty, who also has a PhD in computer science education, I’m at like one or two levels of meta of observing this person and going like, how are they handling this thing? Like, oh, that’s an interesting pedagogical choice of deciding to explain this in this way rather than that way. So, I’m like actively engaged, just not actually engaged in, like, learning something, quote unquote. I’m engaged in like, oh, what are you doing, and why are you doing it that way? I can guess for this, but not for that, so I’ll ask it a question later. So, if that’s the case, though, like what, what would you suggest that faculty do instead?
[29:07] Michael: So I think that, I think, it’s great that you do that, but I think you’re not the median audience member of a faculty talk.
[29:10] Kristin: No, not at all.
[29:11] Michael: I think that’s fair to assume. So I have two suggestions of things I think are better than that. One is, encourage the candidate to pick something that they think they can teach that the faculty don’t already know. Right? So, at CMU, my job talk was on Mob programming, which was kind of a fad in the late, you know, in 2015. And it was something from practice that I thought most people wouldn’t know, right? I mean, find something that is not some super basic topic. And most people know at least something that’s kind of towards the boundaries of computer science in some way, whether it be about practice or education, right?
Michael: The other thing that we ask candidates to do is to jump straight to what you’re trying to evaluate and give a meta talk. And so talk about how you would teach a topic, but instead of us pretending that we’re students in the room, take a meta step back and say, “Here’s how I would present this topic. I would start by presenting these slides. I would stop and do this active learning exercise. Then I would give this assignment.” And present it at a meta-level to the faculty and allow the faculty to ask questions at the meta level of how they would give it, as opposed to pretend you’re in a room and pretend we’re students, give this as if we are students. Instead, present to us as if we are faculty members who maybe would teach this someday, and you’re explaining to us how you would teach it, and then we can kind of jump straight to that meta level. So I think either of those is a better situation for the candidate than the pretend you were all first-year students and teach us about inheritance.
[30:40] Kristin: Yeah, I like that second idea more. I guess one thing that I would be worried about a little bit is that that would be a very quick way to kind of filter out, and maybe this is a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing, all the candidates who basically have no teaching experience. And, cause as someone without much teaching experience or without having taken like a CSEd course won’t necessarily be able to talk about and articulate all of the best practices of pedagogy and that kind of thing. And so, someone who learned about teaching faculty, like, basically during their last year of grad school with no time to prepare, to then like try and come up with a good application would basically completely bomb such a talk cause they would have no idea why, they wouldn’t know what active learning even is. And so they wouldn’t know how to prepare. But maybe that’s a good thing that like, we’re kind of forcing PhD candidates to kind of think about, like, if this is the job for you, you do need to prepare, you can’t just like do research for your whole time and then like, think that you’ll do fine in the market for teaching faculty without any teaching experience, because TAing in many ways does not count.
[31:54] Michael: So, I think that, again, this is maybe just a kind of a broad idea, but I think that most teaching-focused positions higher on potential and not on proven success. There’s not a lot of people like you on the teaching track market. In fact, there’s almost never anyone with your level of experience on the teaching track market, right?
[32:10] Kristin: One of my students is graduating this year.
[32:13] Michael: Sometimes you’ll find a student who has an advisor who really cares, who’ve maybe taken a class on pedagogy, but by and large, most candidates are people who you’re really, you’re really filtering on enthusiasm and excitement for the position more than on demonstrated aptitude, right? And so a lot of, but I still think that asking them to demonstrate the skills of what the job actually, I mean, there’s also this question of like, do I want to give a classroom to someone who doesn’t know what active learning is and tell them to start teaching my students, right?
[32:42] Kristin: Yeah.
[32:43] Michael: And so the, this will poke holes in candidates’ knowledge or show or expose what their knowledge level is. This doesn’t mean that they have to immediately discard, get discarded, right? A faculty could say, well, what sort of mentoring resources do we have? Do we think this is a mentorable thing? Could we teach them about, you know, we have a teaching and learning center at our institution, many institutions do, right? Do we think that this person has the raw material that could make a good teaching track faculty and they just need some mentoring and, and that option is still available to the faculty, but I think that decision should be made based on observing the actual facts of where the candidate is, then a talk that maybe obfuscates that and and the committee is making that decision blind, right?
Michael: And also, I think if it sends a signal to the candidate, there’s a lot of really smart people out there who can learn a lot about active learning in 3 weeks before an interview, if they are specifically prompted to do that, right? So there is also a valuable signaling mechanism that says if you want this sort of position, you should know what active learning is. You don’t have to be an expert in it, but you should at least be able to discuss the concept of active learning superficially in a job talk, or maybe this isn’t a great fit for you.
[33:51] Kristin: Yeah. I think like overall, I agree. It’s definitely, though, would require a bit more of norm shifting than some of the other pieces that are in this memo.
[34:01] Michael: I agree. And what we do, practically speaking, is we prefer the meta-level discussion, but we don’t demand that, and we have a talk with the candidates and find out what their other talks look like. And if they have a talk that they feel good about that isn’t a meta-level talk, we recommend that they give that talk over creating an entirely fresh meta-level talk for us.
[34:26] Kristin: Yeah. OK, all righty. So, given our time, let’s, do you wanna talk about interview or the offer? Cause I feel like we can, we can skip the future faculty development piece, cause there is a white paper for that already, which I will link in the show notes. So, interview or offer, which one do you think is more important to talk about at this point?
[34:47] Michael: I’ll just briefly say that if the interview, we’ve talked a lot about having a rubric and having a rubric cascades into a lot of implications for the interview itself. We talked about the job talk, which has a lot of implications for the interview. One thing that we do that I really like that I’ll just throw that idea out there for people, is to ask, is to invite teaching-focused candidates to come and sit in on one of our classes, but not lecture in it. So they can see what the class is like without having to prepare a brand new lecture from scratch. And this has been wildly popular with candidates because most candidates don’t actually get to see what a class at the institution looks like while they’re interviewing at the institution. And so candidates really like that. So I’ll throw that out as a suggestion, but I think the offer is more interesting and there’s more things to say there. So let’s shift to that if that’s OK.
[35:27] Kristin: All righty. So, big picture, what should people be thinking about the offer?
[35:32] Michael: OK, this is by far the place where the lack of norms is the most painful for the candidates and even for the institutions themselves. So, there’s a really big challenge here, which is that there is a very, very wide range of expectations about when offers go out, and when offers should be expected by, and when acceptance of offers should happen by. And so, essentially, you have a tenure-track market that primarily has due dates around the end of the calendar year. Interviews happen, you know, early interviews happen in maybe late February, early March, all the way through, maybe even April. And then you have offers that, you know, even offers that go out are kind of working on this expectation that you won’t really be able to make a decision until maybe April or even May, when it comes time to make a decision, especially if you’re going to do like a second visit, you know, maybe even into early June, people are expecting or still have offers out there for tenure focused positions.
Michael: Teaching-focused positions, now we get to see, kind of, there’s broadly speaking, there are a lot of different kinds of schools that are interested in teaching-focused faculty. And part of the reason why I’ve specifically been using the term teaching-focused faculty is that this doesn’t necessarily correlate with, like, the job security of the position, a.k.a., whether there is tenure for it or not. So, a small liberal arts college that is teaching-focused will often have tenure in terms of a lifetime security of employment. But they really are really competing with candidates that are look much more like a teaching track position at an R1 institution than the research track position at an R1 institution. And traditionally, these schools do their hiring cycles more likely to happen towards the fall, right? So deadlines that we’re talking like September, maybe even early October, but then they’re bringing in candidates in the fall semester and making offers in late November, December, maybe even like early January, after maybe the break, for example, right?
Michael: But as you can see, this clearly is a problem for candidates if you are a candidate who wants to consider both options. Also, a lot of teaching-focused candidates are PhDs, and there’s a higher degree of normal of PhDs who are in relationships with other PhDs. And if you’re doing like a two-body situation with someone who is on the tenure market, this creates a huge headache because the one partner will need to make a decision before the other partner even is getting offers to come to interview.
Michael: If you are interested in considering a teaching-focused position at R1 type tenure track, you’re, you know, the timelines are one thing, and, you know, so we at CMU have started doing two cycles for teaching-focused positions. We do a fall cycle and a spring cycle. Because we lost out a lot of good candidates that we would reach out in January and February to say, “Hey, could you come for an interview?” And they said, “We’ve already accepted a position.” Right? And this happened more than once, like multiple times to us. And so this is kind of the, that’s kind of the reality, and everybody that I’ve described up till now, I think, is basically acting in good faith, and it’s just kind of following their community norms, but they are part of different communities.
Michael: There’s also another situation that I think is maybe a little bit less good faith, which is the existence of exploding offers, and this is something we’ve seen a lot. An exploding offer, just to be clear, is an offer given to a candidate with an expiration date on the offer. And especially with a short expiration date as a way to have a negotiating technique to get a candidate to say yes to you, because they are in a very uncertain time in their life. And so you use this as a bargaining chip to get them to say yes and get the candidate. And they’re, unfortunately, there seems to be a set of institutions or people who understand that this system can be exploited and can get candidates who maybe they perceive as being better than what they would otherwise get. And so they use these exploding offers to leverage the stress that the candidate is feeling into getting them to say yes to a position that maybe is not in the candidate’s best interest.
Michael: And this is something that happens a lot in teaching-focused positions and it’s something that we understand that, you know, in the paper, we talk about how the, you know, we do understand that maybe there is like a certain number of lines, and if someone says no, you want to get the next person in and give them an offer. And so there are reasons why there are deadlines for offers. But these deadlines, particularly with the kind of spread of, range of dates that interviews happen at creates a particularly difficult situation for many, many candidates.
[40:32] Kristin: Yeah. And I think like we should emphasize that this is especially impacting the teaching faculty because often the teaching faculty are looking at many different kinds of schools, and since some of those schools are more on the fall semester cycle and others are more on the spring semester cycle, basically you are going to be forcing them to choose. And if they are any good, they will probably get an offer in the fall semester, and then they completely are lost out on the spring semester. Though I would argue that the spring semester schools are more often the R1s that would benefit potentially from having teaching faculty, and they have different pros and cons. I was gonna say more resourced, but I don’t know if that’s actually true. So, we’ll say R1s have different pros and cons compared to the ones with, that do the fall cycle, and not allowing a student to decide between those by kind of forcing their hand is just not fair.
[41:28] Michael: And if it’s a two-body problem where they’re trying to find two academic positions, it’s virtually impossible to get a, if you’re a couple looking for two positions, getting a tenure-track position and a teaching-track position where the teaching-track positions are getting offers in November and December makes it virtually impossible on that couple.
[41:46] Kristin: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a big mess in many directions. I am so grateful my partner’s not in the industry.
[41:51] Michael: And, and it doesn’t need to be particularly right. Like this is the problem with this, is like there are things about, there are aspects of an R1 institution that are just inherently different than a like a small liberal arts college. And so there are ways in which the jobs will be different, just inherently in what they are like. And as you mentioned, there’s pros and cons to each, and absolutely that is the case. And some of those pros and cons are inherent, but the deadline thing is fairly arbitrary and is causing a lot of, I would argue, is causing a lot of pain and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of kind of missed opportunities for arbitrary reasons that there is no real systemic reason why these deadlines have to be that far apart.
[42:29] Kristin: So, what would you say is the most important thing you would want our listeners to get out of our conversation?
[42:35] Michael: I mean, I hopefully if someone has stuck around to this point, they’ll have kind of hopefully got this point by now, right? But like, the teaching-track job market is relatively new, doesn’t have a large amount of community norms around what it should look like. And so to find the best candidates, you’re going to need to be a little bit more clear and a little bit more explicit about what you’re offering in your institution, what you’re looking for in a candidate. And I think that with some extra guidance and some extra clarity, I think that this can really go a long way to helping both hiring committees finding great candidates and for great candidates finding great positions for them to be in.
[43:16] Kristin: Yeah, and I think the one way to think of the white paper is it’s really trying to provide better communication in both directions for understanding how to do this well.
[43:26] Michael: Yes, and we think basically the solution to this lack of community norms is increased communication from both sides. I think that is a very well put.
[43:33] Kristin: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Michael.
[43:36] Michael: Thanks for having me.
[43:37] Kristin: And thank you for listening. Know someone who might find this episode helpful? Share it or give us a shout-out online. That is a great way to support the podcast. And if you’re looking for other ways to help us out, join us on Patreon at patreon.com/csedpodcast, particular shoutout to patrons Daniel Prol, Dilma Da Silva, and Susan Rodger for helping to keep the podcast ad-free and supporting production. For past episodes, transcripts, and links, visit csedpodcast.org and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! And otherwise, this was the CS-Ed Podcast. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and our producer is Chris Martinez. And remember, teaching computer science is more than just knowing computer science. I hope you found something useful for your teaching today.