asking for a teaching letter

The Undergraduate Chair is the default person to ask to write a letter concerning your teaching. You are of course welcome to ask someone else, if you feel that there is another faculty member who is more qualified to write such a letter. Also, the undergradute chair can refuse to write a letter, if for example your teaching has been an unmitigated disaster and there is nothing positive to say about it.

If you need a teaching letter:

It is a good idea to contact me a couple of weeks before you need the letter to be finished. (This is a good idea for any letter of recommendation. In fact for a letter of recommendation concerning your research, a longer advance time is better.)
Please give me as much of the following information as possible:
- all student evaluation forms and summaries that you have --- please do not give me only the information that presents you in the most positive light; I do not feel comfortable writing a letter if I am relying on data that has been pre-screened by the subject of the letter.
- a list of what classes you have taught at the U of T, and when you taught them. (If you are giving me student evaluation forms from every class you have taught here, it suffices to tell me this; and then I can figure out what you did and when from the evaluation forms.)
- Please let me know what if anything you are teaching this semester, either as an instructor or as a TA running a tutorial, and whether it is okay for me to drop in on your class briefly, to observe your teaching. (I encourage you to agree to this --- it makes it easier for me to write a convincing letter.) If it is okay, please let me know about times that are better or worse than others, eg times at which your students are taking an in-class exam. It would not hurt also to tell me where and when your class meets. This is especially true if you are teaching only a tutorial this semeter --- then it is not easy for me to look up this information.
- Any supplementary information that might be relevant to your teaching (eg, a teaching statement or a CV, if it contains a history of teaching jobs you have held) can be helpful.
My office should have a lot of the above data, but records have not been kept perfectly, and in any case it is a bit of a burden to have to look things up for each one of the many letters I must write. So please give me the above information even if it seems unnecessary. I will return things such as student evaluation forms to you when I am finished with them.
If you have some kind of evidence of good teaching from a university other than the U of T, I will not comment on it in any letter that I write; I don't have any special insight into what, say, an average of 3.7 out of 5 on a student evaluation forms from the University of X means, so I'd rather not say anthing about it. In this situation I encourage you to supply this information directly to the institutions to which you are applying. For example, your teaching statement can include an appendix along the following lines:
Teaching experience at the University of X
- average of 3.7 out of 5 on student evaluation forms in Math 101, Spring 2006.
- Selected student comments from Math 101, Spring 2006: Great prof! -- clear lectures -- the professor was very helpful during his office hours -- etc.
documentation available upon request.
this page is still nder construction.