Make the teaching section of your CV easier for the hiring committee to parse
Here is a quick tip for upgrading your CV’s teaching section to demonstrate your skills and present your experience.
There are common mistakes in job materials
I have supported so many graduate students and faculty in developing really solid academic job materials, so I have seen a lot of job materials in various states of readiness. In doing this work, I have a list of the problems I see over and over again. (Maybe this will become a series? Leave a comment if you’d like that!) Your job search materials ideally all work together to present your skills and experiences that relate to you doing the job. I’m going to describe one big-picture mistake I see across job materials, focus on the challenge of that mistake in one particular spot in academic job materials, and then share a strategy for solving the problem that that mistake creates.
Mistake: making the hiring committee think too hard
The overall mistake I see a lot is that candidates assume that the hiring committee knows more than they actually do. Across all the materials, a candidate may leave acronyms unexplained, fail to explain what a particular niche award is, or omit key context that helps the hiring committee understand the full scope of the candidate’s talents. By leaving out details, the candidate requires the hiring committee to do a lot of thinking to understand what the candidate is trying to get across. Further, key context could make the difference between a hiring committee being able to fully imagine the candidate as a colleague or not. (Two things I emphasized as being crucial in the application process: make the hiring committee do very little work and help them fully visualize you as a colleague.) When the hiring committee is forced to do a lot of thinking, they will likely choose not to do the thinking and just move on to the next application, hoping that one is easier to read. It’s super important to make all your materials easy to read, and this is especially true of your CV, which is a laundry list of all the stuff you’ve done: presentations, education, conferences, publications, service to the academy, teaching, etc.
Mistake: assuming the hiring committee is psychic
The CV is one common place I see the problem of assuming the hiring committee knows more than they do. In the worst cases, candidates simply write the course name and number for the courses they’ve taught. In that section, they will literally write “AMST 103 FALL 2025.” But AMST 103 doesn’t really mean anything to anyone outside of your institution. I’ve been at multiple institutions when numbering systems changed, too, so the numbers may have meant something at one point in time and don’t mean that anymore. Some candidates will do slightly better and include the title of the course: “Genetics and genomes.” Okay, this is better, as it tells me something about the specific topic of the course, but it doesn’t tell me about the type of course. Some candidates will provide some information about the course content. This is great. Adding more information to your teaching section will give the hiring committee more context, details, and potential talking points. Remember, the primary goal of your job search materials is to make the hiring committee want to talk to you. So giving them information that makes them want to talk to you is ideal.
What I am proposing is an easy formula that includes context and highlights your curriculum development skills, as well as your adaptability and versatility in teaching a variety of course types and number of students. I specifically developed this for a friend of mine and her institution wants to copy it. (To be candid, I wanted to post this online to make sure I got credit for this idea.)
The framework I recommend:
Course Name and Number, Course Title
Semesters/Years Taught
Student rating: These numerical scores can be especially helpful if you can demonstrate that your scores are higher than the average in your department/college/overall university.
Course type: This can help contextualize the next bit of information, and if you include the average number of students per course, or the range, it can show off your ability to teach courses of different types and sizes. You can make a decision to include this or not based on the information about the institution. For example, if they have maximum class sizes of 30, showing that you have only taught classes with 100+ students may work against you. Use your judgment. You can also include information about how frequently the class met and for how long. Again, use your judgment to include information that does what you want to do to portray the best version of you.
Description: A brief summary or overview, like an elevator pitch, so that the reader knows the topics you covered, the time period, etc.
Recent innovation: Especially if this was a new prep for you, or if you inherited an outdated course to revise, it is crucial to indicate how much effort this was and what you did to make it not only more authentically yours, but also more updated for the times.
Assessment strategy: This one is very optional, but can be especially helpful if you are doing something different or unique in your course. If this is redundant with the innovation section, then omit it.
Representative student feedback: This should be a quote from your evaluations or some other place that is verifiable.
The framework applied to examples
Below, I’ve included two examples to help you get an idea for what this looks like in the real world.
Example 1
AMST 103, American History
Semesters/Years Taught
Student rating: 4.4/5
Course type: Lower-division survey course with 20-30 students per section
Description: Survey American history course. Explores origins of freedom and slavery, the market revolution, and evolution of American government
Recent innovation: Developed three essay assignments on primary source analysis
Representative student feedback: “Hosting writing workshops the week of the papers where she provided assistance in framing our outlines helped make sure we were on track.”
Example 2
Genetics 300, Course Title
Semesters/Years Taught
Student rating: 4.2/5, department average: 3.5/5, college average: 3.7/5
Course type: Senior seminar, 12-18 students per section, each section met once per week for 3 hours.
Description: This course supports students in developing critical thinking skills by centering primary literature – reading peer-reviewed studies – and developing follow-up studies which they propose. Further, students mock up potential outcomes, generating graphs and other data points to display what they anticipate might occur if they were to take on these studies.
Recent innovation: To replace the long-standing senior seminar paper, I developed a grant panel project in which students propose a grant and defend their proposal to a grant review committee.
Representative student feedback: “This course helped me more deeply understand how to design an informative experiment. I was limited by the fake funding for our project, so I knew I couldn’t design experiments that would not be useful. I feel like I could apply for a real grant now.”
The benefit of this framework is that the hiring committee can easily skim this information, and if they don’t care about it, they can just not read it. Hiring committees will not read a dense packet of student feedback comments, and they won’t go looking for your eval scores, but putting them up front can be so helpful. Finally, it can demonstrate your versatility and adaptability in the types of courses you can teach and the number of students you can manage at a time. Using this format, you can paint the picture for the hiring committee that you can teach at their institution because you’ve already done relevant things elsewhere.
Let me know how it goes!
If you are on the job market or up for reappointment and you use this in your CV, please let me know how it goes! I love to hear about your successes and I am always rooting you on! If you’re an educational developer and you use this to coach your clients on their CVs, please remember where you found this. Educational development tends to be pretty loosey-goosey with attribution, so I’d love for the recognition to make its way back. If you’re on a hiring committee and you totally disagree with this approach, let me know! Pushback helps me grow and alternative perspectives make me wiser.
Additional resources
Of course, if you’re on the academic job market this year and looking for some support in crafting your materials, I offer one-on-one consultations. You can check out my testimonials page to see how people feel about working with me. (Spoiler: they’re very happy!) I have a written version of my cover letter writing guide, with a guide for writing a cover letter that hiring committees actually want to read.
Good luck out there: I’m crossing my fingers for you!!
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