"Evidence of excellence in teaching"

I haven't served on a search committee, so I can only speak for what apparently worked for me as an applicant. My teaching portfolio included: a teaching statement, selected syllabi (tailored to the interests of the hiring dept), and student eval data sheets (with departmental data sheets for context) for every class I ever taught (but not the actual Scantron sheets or the student comments). Additionally, I would send a letter of recommendation from a faculty evaluator at a previous adjunct job. For a job where teaching was emphasized over research, I would send a CV with the teaching experience moved to the top, research further down. All in all, my complete teaching package came to 41 pages, about half of which was the student evals. Sometimes, I did not send the evals, because of file size limitations on e-applications. But in my cover letter I would always offer to send additional materials by request.

Some of my syllabi were for courses I had taught, and some were courses I proposed (but did not teach) or for courses I have an interest in teaching. So, some were "made up," but I can say that I put just as much work into constructing those syllabi as I put into syllabi for courses I have taught. (This is a good summer project for future jobseekers.) Which is to say, if you lack teaching experience, you can still think about teaching and invent syllabi and and a write a teaching statement.

I only ever had to do one teaching demo. It was a weird kind of trial by fire. I was asked to teach part of a class on something completely unrelated to the AOS/AOC of the job, and completely unrelated to my AOS/AOC. It was, so far as I could tell, an opportunistic scheduling -- the prof offered to give up half the class for the teaching demo. So I had to come up with something I knew that I could relate to the topic. At the half way point in the class, the SC filed in to observe from the back of the class. (In retrospect, the entire campus visit was a little odd, and I did not get the job.)

I reckon there must be some variation in what SCs are looking for in a teaching portfolio, and how much weight they give to various elements of the package.

I suppose applicants with less teaching experience might be at a disadvantage for jobs that "value" teaching, if actual teaching experience is a prerequisite. As I understand it, European PhD programs don't routinely (or ever?) include teaching or assisting duties for grads. Do they employ student evals? What should those applicants do about the teaching package (other than explain why they don't have teaching experience or evals)?

~zombie