Teaching Statements

This week I was fortunate to chat with several faculty on preparing or updating their Teaching Statements, so I thought this article on "Reflections on Statements of Teaching Across Faculty Career Phases” from Transformative Dialogues (April 2017) might be helpful. Highlights include:

• Major question: "How has length of time in a university career influenced one’s teaching philosophy?”;

• 15 were involved in this case study (6 in early career; 5 in mid; & 4 in senior);

• All completed a 3 week program, which included Instructional Skills, Assessment strategies, student engagement, etc.;

• Study shares Pragmatic, Reflective & Scholarly Approaches to developing a Teaching Statement;

• For the Scholarly (SoTL) approach, a summary quote, "The opportunity to learn about the topic of a teaching philosophy provided immersion into educational literature and engagement with other faculty members was immense."

Abstract: Teaching philosophy statements are regularly requested from faculty for academic positions, tenure and promotion. While faculty may be required to write a teaching philosophy, how one comes to create or utilize these statements is largely unknown. This retrospective study examined whether faculty members from early, mid and senior career phases valued a teaching philosophy prior, during or on completion of their participation in an educational development program. Results indicated faculty members began writing their teaching philosophy from a pragmatic perspective, but after completing the program were able to incorporate both scholarly and reflective knowledge to positively impact the development, redesign or revised implementation of their teaching philosophy.