I've been told that when applying for a teaching position, your reference letters can be written by anyone who is familiar with your teaching capabilities in detail. I feel that this primarily just means students, but I wonder if there's some unspoken rule that reference letters should come from people in positions of authority, e.g. professors for whom I've served as TA, administrative staff in the math department, etc. In reality, it's the students who know my teaching capabilities in detail, and perhaps to a lesser degree my friends, whereas professors and administrators have no direct knowledge my teaching abilities whatsoever, and might only have heard things here or there from students, or have read my student evaluations and seen the scores.
So should reference letters predominantly come from authority figures, or is it okay to have them all come from students?
Best Answer
IMO, The best teaching letters come from senior faculty members who have supervised you as a teacher and have sat in on several of your classes to observe your teaching. At many schools, it is standard procedure for this to happen. The letter should also discuss student evaluations, including numerical scores and some positive comments made by students on their evaluations. If this doesn't happen automatically at your school, then you should ask a faculty member to visit your class. This could be your advisor, or the faculty member in charge of the course you're teaching, or someone else on the faculty who you feel comfortable approaching. I would be very skeptical, for a variety of reasons, of an application whose only teaching letter(s) are from undergraduate(s). Indeed, any class is likely to contain at least a few students who are enthusiastic about the teacher, and a few who have a very negative opinion, so a couple of positive letters from handpicked student don't mean that much.