Overview

There are plenty of resources available online and in print that can help you with your teaching statement and teaching portfolio. It’s important, of course, to discuss the particulars of your statement with your advisor.

You’ll find the resources available agree on three basic points.

• Start the process of developing your statement with open ended writing designed to help you find the material you’ll need for the statement
• Share your text with people, such as your advisor and other allies. Their feedback will guide your rewrite.
• Consult with models and resources to produce the kind of document readers expect

For this workshop, I’ve organized excerpts from the Cornell and Vanderbilt websites. Links are embedded in the document.

Our workshop begins with a brief introduction to the genre, but only to guide our question today, which is “What is your philosophy of Teaching”. The workshop corresponds to the  sections of this handout.

• Understanding the Genre, Part One
• Understanding the Genre, Part Two: Teaching Philosophies (Article)
• Getting Started on the Content: Prompts and Topics for Drafting

What is the purpose of a Teaching Philosophy Statement?

(gradschool.cornell.edu)

You generally need a teaching statement to apply for an academic position.

• A teaching statement:conveys your teaching values, beliefs, and goals to a broader audience
• provides a set of criteria and/or standards to judge the quality of your teaching
• provides evidence of your teaching effectiveness

What is a Teaching Philosophy Statement

A teaching philosophy statement is a narrative that includes

• your conception of teaching and learning
• a description of how you teach
• justification for why you teach that way
• The statement can
• demonstrate that you have been reflective and purposeful about your teaching
• communicate your goals as an instructor and your corresponding actions in the classroom

General Guidelines

• Make the length suit the context. Generally, they are 1–2 pages.
• Use present tense and the first person, in most cases.
• Avoid technical terms and use broadly understood language and concepts, in most cases. Write with the audience in mind. Have someone from your field guide you on discipline-specific jargon and issues to include or exclude.
• Include teaching strategies and methods to help people “see” you in the classroom. Include specific examples of your teaching strategies, assignments, discussions, etc. Help them to visualize the learning environment you create and the exchanges between you and your students.
• Make it memorable and unique. The search committee is seeing many of these documents—What is going to set you apart? What will they remember? Your teaching philosophy will come to life if you create a vivid portrait of yourself as a person who is intentional about teaching practices and committed to your career.

Teaching Philosophy Statement Dos and Don’ts

• Don’t give idyllic BUT empty concepts
• Don’t repeat your CV
• Do research on the teaching institution and disciplinary trends
• Do keep it short (1–2 pages)
• Do provide concrete examples and evidence of usefulness of teaching concepts
• Do discuss impact of methods, lessons learned, challenges and innovations—how did students learn?
• Do discuss connections between teaching, research, and service
• Do “Own” your philosophy: Don’t make general statements such as “students don’t learn through lecture” or “the only way to teach is with class discussion.” These could be detrimental, appearing as if you have all of the answers. Instead, write about your experiences and your beliefs. You “own” those statements and appear more open to new and different ideas about teaching. Even in your own experience, you make choices about the best teaching methods for different courses and content: sometimes lecture is most appropriate; other times you may use service-learning, for example.

Teaching Philosophies (Cheryl Ball, PhD, jobs.ceball.com)

Teaching Philosophies, like Cover Letters for the academic job market, tend to have a standard formula for organizing and presenting your teaching information. Coming from a university that prides itself on its pedagogical theories (as ISU does), your teaching philosophy should be strong, reflect your own pedagogical studies. Not all schools will require teaching philosophies, and it may even be possible that no schools you apply to will require them, but that’s a rare scenario and so you should be prepared with one when you go on the market — and well in advance — since teaching philosophies are sometimes the most difficult genre to “get right.” When you are asked to send one, you may only have a few days to do so, so work on yours early and run it by several faculty members in different areas of expertise (since faculty from all areas of a department may be on a search committee). Writing a teaching philosophy is also excellent practice because you’ll often need one (or some version of one) for when you apply for third-year review and/or tenure, if you’re on the tenure track, no matter what kind of school you get a job at.

Generally speaking, teaching philosophies have the following four parts, although you may find successful examples that break from these trends (if you do, let me know, because I have yet to find any):

Introductory paragraph. This opening paragraph summarizes your personal philosophy of teaching. In it, you will introduce a theoretical framework that you draw on to support your teaching practices. (the purpose of the teaching philosophy is to show that you actually have researched and reflected on your teaching practice). The theoretical framework can be an area of pedagogy (critical, cultural, feminist, etc.), a combination of them (critical, cultural, AND feminist, etc.), or something else altogether (e.g., I call mine a “Happenings” pedagogy, based on Geoff Sirc’s book called English Composition as a Happening, which I mix with a multiliteracies framework, based on The New London Group’s work. Keep in mind that mine is longer and less formal than yours will likely be, but the basic outline of the formulaic structure is the same).

It’s likely that you DO have a philosophy, but you may not yet have articulated it (which is the hard part). The workshop will help you with this part, if you’re having trouble. The things to keep in mind with this paragraph is that you need to (1) describe, (2) define, and (3) justify/explain what your philosophy is and why you use it, but it needs to be in broad terms (i.e., applicable to any kind of class you might teach), because you’ll reserve the specific examples for the next two paragraphs.

Teaching example from Class #1. These two example paragraphs are often where students run into difficulties — they stay too “meta” and don’t get concrete enough. The point of both the teaching example paragraphs is to show how you enact your philosophy (from paragraph #1) in actual classroom practice as well as to show search committees what you can (and want to) teach.

Generally, you’ll have two different courses you’ll want to talk about (to show your teaching breadth — luckily, while at ISU, you’ll have the chance to teach LOTS of different classes, which isn’t the case for PhDs at most universities, so this is where you’ll stand out!). You should choose classes that reflect your area of expertise as well as the kind of job you want. For instance, if you want to teach at a small school where you’ll be asked to teach one section of first-year composition every year, make SURE to include an example from having taught English 101 or 101.10. And if you’re writing your dissertation about women and gender studies, then make sure (in your second example) to include an example from that class which you’ve likely taught as part of your required Teaching Internship. (Right? Makes sense, huh. Show your breadth and depth! They’ll hire you in a heartbeat!) Which course you put in the second paragraph and which in the third paragraph (below) will depend on what you want to emphasize. This may be a nuanced matter that we can talk more about in the workshop.

Now, another way you may want to think about picking which classes to write about is by choosing which assignments in your classes went really well and that exemplify your teaching philosophy. Some job market candidates may want to pick an assignment as “small” as an in-class discussion about a particular book/novel they assigned students to read so as to showcase the course concept, why you chose the book/novel you did, and how you led the discussion (or didn’t, according to your particular pedagogical style) — all in a way that allows you to pinpoint how you use your teaching philosophy in practice. (make sure to explicitly connect your practice back to your theory, as discussed in the first paragraph of your philosophy!). However, the majority of these teaching example paragraphs should be pretty specific and practice in nature — describe how and why you gave the assignment you did, what the outcomes were, what the students learned from it, why you wanted them to learn X from it, whether they did or not, whether they liked it or not (especially if you can include teaching evaluation comments as evidence). This will usually all make you look good, although sometimes powerful philosophy statements can also come from failed teaching experiments. Be careful of those, because they can backfire.

The trick is you only have a paragraph to explain each class/assignment. And these paragraphs are only about 250 words or less.

Teaching example from Class #2. Repeat above, using a different class example. Make sure it makes sense how you transition between the two examples. For instance, if you provide a “small” example like the discussion mentioned above, then show a “bigger picture” example (like a final project/paper, etc.) in the second teaching-example paragraph. And both should explicitly refer back to your overall philosophical approach, as outlined in the opening paragraph.

Conclusion. The conclusion simply allows you to summarize your examples in relation to your philosophy. (It gives you a little more room to do so.) It also allows you to point out particular areas of teaching that you’d like to focus on in the future — not necessarily classes you’d like to teach (although that may also be applicable), but stuff like: “I’ve reflected on my own teaching and have learned X about successful strategies, but I also want to explore Y.” — So it’s kinda like a mini-dissertation about your teaching practices where you present future research possibilities. The conclusion also gives you a chance to summarize the range of courses you’ve taught and show that your philosophy applies to all of them (which, hopefully, it does… and if it doesn’t, perhaps either your philosophy doesn’t work in all cases, or you need to examine how to better choose your classes and/or describe your philosophy so that it does fit all the cases you want to talk about. Again, we can talk about this in the workshop.

Finally, you can google all sorts of example Teaching Philosophies and follow their models. Keep in mind that the TOTAL length is two single-spaced pages, including name and title/description. No more!

Consider what you believe is the end goal or purpose of education (gradschool.cornell.edu)

• content mastery
• engaged citizenry
• individual fulfillment
• critical thinking
• problem solving
• discovery and knowledge generation
• teamwork
• self-directed learning
• experiential learning

Reflection Questions (cfte.vanderbilt.edu)

These questions and exercises are meant to be tools to help you begin reflecting on your beliefs and ideas as a teacher. No single Teaching Statement can contain the answers to all or most of these inquiries and activities.

• Why do you teach the way you do?
• What should students expect of you as a teacher?
• What is a method of teaching you rely on frequently? Why don’t you use a different method?
• What do you want students to learn? How do you know your goals for students are being met?
• What should your students be able to know or do as a result of taking your class?
• How can your teaching facilitate student learning?
• How do you as a teacher create an engaging or enriching learning environment?
• What specific activities or exercises do you use to engage your students? What do you want your students to learn from these activities?
• How has your thinking about teaching changed over time? Why?

More Reflection Questions

Examining our teaching philosophies (excerpt Six Questions That Will Bring Your Teaching Philosophy into Focus) Neil Haave, PH.D. (Facultyfocus.com)

These questions are best answered in conversation with a colleague or two.

• Describe the best learning experience you have had as a student. (This helps to identify how we best learn and reminds us as instructors what it is like to be a student. Maryellen Weimer (2013) recently discussed this in the context of influencing the learning environment)
• Describe the best teaching experience you have had as an instructor. Are there any similarities to the learning experience you described above? (This question attempts to link our learning to our teaching.)
• What are you trying to achieve in your students with your teaching? (This is a big question and may be best initially answered by thinking about it in the context of what you feel is the course you teach with the most success.)
• Why is this important to you? (This helped me to begin articulating my approach to my discipline in the context of teaching. For others I know it becomes larger than the discipline itself and may link to the personal growth of students and not only their intellectual growth.)
• How do you achieve your objectives you wrote down for question #3 above? That is, what teaching strategies or approaches do you use in your classes that produce the learning environment or opportunities for your students to reach your teaching objectives? (Hopefully, this has been informed by your answers in questions #1 & 2 above. If there is no apparent connection between this question and your answers to #1 & 2, then this might be cause to pause and reflect why this is.)
• Why do you use these particular teaching strategies as opposed to others that are available to you? (This is where you start developing the argument or citing the evidence for the value or success of your approach to teaching. Hopefully, you are able to make links to your own learning philosophy.)

A guide for writing your Teaching Philosophy Statement

“Writing a Statement of Teaching Philosophy for the Academic Job Search,” from the University of Michigan:

https://crlt.umich.edu/resources-publications/teaching-philosophies-statements

Samples

https://crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tstpum

Articles on Teaching Statements

http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2006/04/writing-teaching-statement

http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Write-a-Statement-of/45133/

http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-Your-Philosophy-on-T/45132/

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Teaching-Statement/45409/

http://chronicle.com/article/Everything-But-the-Teaching/46672/

“Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement” by Helen G. Grundman: http://www.ams.org/notices/200611/comm-grundman.pdf

Adapted from Cheryl Ball article found in this document in the section called “Model”

Introductory paragraph. This opening paragraph summarizes your personal philosophy of teaching. In it, you will introduce a theoretical framework that you draw on to support your teaching practices.

• The things to keep in mind with this paragraph is that you need to (1) describe, (2) define, and (3) justify/explain what your philosophy is and why you use it, but it needs to be in broad terms (i.e., applicable to any kind of class you might teach), because you’ll reserve the specific examples for the next two paragraphs.

Teaching example from Class #1. These two example paragraphs are often where students run into difficulties — they stay too “meta” and don’t get concrete enough. Paragraphs are only about 250 words or less.

• The point of both the teaching example paragraphs is to show how you enact your philosophy (from paragraph #1) in actual classroom practice as well as to show search committees what you can (and want to) teach.
• You should choose classes that reflect your area of expertise as well as the kind of job you want.
• Now, another way you may want to think about picking which classes to write about is by choosing which assignments in your classes went really well and that exemplify your teaching philosophy.
• The majority of these teaching example paragraphs should be pretty specific and practice in nature — describe how and why you gave the assignment you did, what the outcomes were, what the students learned from it, why you wanted them to learn X from it, whether they did or not, whether they liked it or not (especially if you can include teaching evaluation comments as evidence).

Teaching example from Class #2. Repeat above, using a different class example. Make sure it makes sense how you transition between the two examples.

• If you provide a “small” example like the discussion mentioned above, then show a “bigger picture” example (like a final project/paper, etc.) in the second teaching-example paragraph.
• Both should explicitly refer back to your overall philosophical approach, as outlined in the opening paragraph.

Conclusion. The conclusion simply allows you to summarize your examples in relation to your philosophy. (It gives you a little more room to do so.)

• Allows you to point out particular areas of teaching that you’d like to focus on in the future — not necessarily classes you’d like to teach (although that may also be applicable), but stuff like: “I’ve reflected on my own teaching and have learned X about successful strategies, but I also want to explore Y.” — So it’s kinda like a mini-dissertation about your teaching practices where you present future research possibilities.
• Gives you a chance to summarize the range of courses you’ve taught and show that your philosophy applies to all of them (which, hopefully, it does… and if it doesn’t, perhaps either your philosophy doesn’t work in all cases, or you need to examine how to better choose your classes and/or describe your philosophy so that it does fit all the cases you want to talk about.