Pitching Your Teaching & Tutoring Experience

by Marisa Yerace (ICaP), Ghada Seifeddine (Purdue OWL), and Eric Joseph (Purdue OWL)

This page is for teachers and tutors who want to think about self-assessment, handling feedback and evaluations of teaching and tutoring, and articulating those skills for academic and non-academic employers.

Why do this? We want to make clear the different ways you can use feedback and data to improve your teaching and tutoring and think through ways you can talk about how cool you are!

How do we figure out how we’re doing?

What measures do we already have?

Existing

End-of-course evaluations
Writing Lab evaluations
Required observations, early on

Issues

Implicit bias in some surveys
Observations are only one point in time
- Consider the effect if you were able to tell a story!

How can we assess ourselves?

Teaching journals
Session Notes

Getting feedback from others:

Observations (peers)
Asking students/clients for feedback
- Surveys
- Student reflections

See Ghada's Checklist on self-, peer-, and student assessment here!

A few tips if you collect feedback via survey:

First, decide what you want to know and how you’re going to use that information.
Consider how your students will understand the question and think of an answer.
Limit open-response–consider mental load for each answer type!

… But what are we looking for?

Eric has chatted with former tutors about what skills their employers are interested in: have a look at his list of soft skills from teaching and tutoring.

Once we have skills and evaluations to talk about…

What do we do with this information?

(Remember: some eval measures will be biased.)
- Save it, think about it, and look at the big picture alongside individual comments
Create a plan and share it–with students, a mentor, etc.
- How can you show you are listening?

How do we share it with others?

Use it in your teaching/tutoring philosophy/cover letters/graduate application materials: Here's a tipsheet for writing those documents!
Consider ways to visualize your course evaluations using data visualization techniques.
Talk about it in your non-academic interviews: think about how to develop your elevator pitch.

What do I do now?

What are some ways you’re thinking of evaluating your own skills?
Who else are you trying to articulate your strengths to?
How can ICaP and the OWL support you as you pitch your experience and skills?

→ Stop by ICaP Studio Hours: M 9-11 and R 11-1!

→ Book a Writing Lab appointment to review your job materials!

Upcoming ICaP Professional Materials Events: Nov 30 9-11 & Dec 1 12-2 in HEAV G042