What is a Teaching Statement?
Sometimes called a “teaching philosophy”, teaching statements are one-page documents that give an outside audience insight into who you are, or might become, as a teacher.Teaching statements are typically demanded at key momentsin our professional lives, such as when we apply for jobs or go up for tenure and promotion. However, frequent readers of these documents often describe them as “drab and predictable”.In their 2008 study, Meizlish and Kaplan surveyed hundreds of faculty hiring committees in six different disciplines. They found that committees value teaching statements that link teaching philosophies to specific teaching practices and experiences; this is a far cry from the vague platitudes and unobjectionable teaching-clichés found in most teaching statements.
A teaching statement makes an argument about who you are in the classroom, supports that argument with specific evidence from your experience, and finally, states the significance of your claim--how your ability to do this work well has led to increasing responsibilities, recognition, or rewards.
How to Craft a Compelling Teaching Statement
Teaching statements induce anxiety because no one ever talks about how to write them. This page provides a practical guide for how to articulate your teaching philosophies, mine artifacts you already have for evidence of your specific teaching practices and experiences and provides a framework for you to structure your statement around.
Begin by reflecting on a specific course you taught. You can use our Course Wrapper Worksheet as a guide to help you ask specific questions that will draw out specific examples from your teaching experiences. You can also use the Taxonomy of Reflection to draw out deeper levels of self-awareness and reflection.
The Teaching Behaviors Checklist (TBC) can be used to discover what you value about teaching in yourself and others. This instrument will also give you a vocabularyto speak to specific behaviors that lead to good teaching. Rank your top five items and ask yourself, why these and not others? The items you choose reveal your beliefs and values about what is most important about teaching. These values then become the core of your statement because they reveal what makes you different from other effective teachers. These behaviors form the core of your argument about who you are as a teacher and why it is effective, they are, in essence your these statement.
Mine your Course Wrapper reflection, student evaluations of teaching, peer reviews, and other evidence you have collected over the course of your experiences in the classroom for specific anecdotes and examples that illustrate how the values you just identified impact your teaching.
A Framework for Your Teaching Statement
Now that you have your evidence, it is time to start crafting your teaching statement.
The DNA of professional statements—whether it is a cover letter, teaching, diversity, or research statement—is a three-part formula: Claim, Evidence, Significance. These is the essential formula for each of your paragraphs in your teaching statement.
Claim is made up of your argument for your effectiveness (see the TBC above for ideas and words to articulate the unique value you believe you bring to the classroom).
Evidence is the specific examples you use to illustrate the truth of your Claim. The most compelling statements use stories and anecdotes. For those with teaching experience, the most difficult work of crafting your teaching statement might be choosing only one or two examples from the huge range of experiences you had had in the classroom. But this is critical editing work you need to do to have an effective statement. Resist the urge to tell every great idea or activity and narrow your focus to one or two.
Significance is the examples you give and the words you choose to describe why what you domatters and how you know it is effective. Explain how your efforts have earned you recognition at the departmental, university, or national levels as evidenced by an award, grant, or publication you have earned for your teaching. There are far more exceptional teachers than there are awards to recognize them though, so another way to “end” is to recognize additional opportunities you’ve received—new classes to teach, new leadership in your department, accepted conference proposals, etc.Do NOT include quotes or feedback from Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) in your statement. They are biased and unreliable sources of data. Other faculty who are on the search committee reviewing you may object to either negative or positive feedback cited based on their own experiences with SETs in their career. You can site student feedback as long as you contextualize it and its significance, but do not cite end of course evaluations as “proof” of your teaching effectiveness.
Let’s look at two examples. As you read, consider which of the two candidates YOU would select for a teaching job and why:
Candidate 1: I believe good teachers demonstrate a commitment to their students’ learning more than to their own content. I can lecture quickly and cover a lot of content, but if no one remembers what I’ve covered than I haven’t really done my job. In all my classrooms, I strive to create learning opportunities that meet students where they are and encourage them to achieve higher levels of success.
Candidate 2: In my large lecture course, I use team-based learning to give students the feel of a smaller class and to create networks of support so that no one falls through the cracks. Not only has this practice increased attendance and participation, but student feedback shows that individuals recognize their teams are not just the people they “do group work with” but rather a learning community in which they play an important role.
One of these statements gives you a concrete image and tells a story. The other is so broad it could be written by anyone. Although the first writer was probably hoping a broad statement would show broad potential, what we find is the opposite. The narrower your focus and the more concrete your imagery, the more clearly we imagine the whole.
When writing the story for your teaching statement, it is important to be mindful of your audience.
If you are writing a teaching statement as part of a job application where the audience does not know you, be sure to share “fairytales,” i.e. innovations, triumphs, awards, which are narratives that focus on small wins in short timelines, such as a single class or semester.
If you are writing a teaching statement as part of your tenure and promotion packet or annual review where the audience already knows you, you can share “failure tales”, i.e. stories of ambition and overcoming obstacles that span a longer timeline. This narrative seeks to capture process whereas a “fairy-tale” seeks to capture a momentary success.
By shifting your teaching statement from philosophical to anecdotal, you are moving from a theoretical picture of good teaching to a specific illustration of who you are in the classroom.To ensure you have done this successfully, proofread for abstract ideas.
Do's and Dont's
Finally, here are some concrete do’s and don’ts for crafting your teaching statement:
- Be Confident (avoid unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, act/write like you imagine a successful professor would act/write, no exclamation points!)
- Be Authentic. Focus on what & why, not when & where details. You are using claims and evidence to paint a picture of who you are in the classroom; you are not giving a deposition of exactly what you do and when and why. Keep your eye on the big picture.
- Use specific words from the Job Ad if you are writing a statement for a specific position
- Don’t use Statements of belief:
- I think...
- I hope...
- I believe...
- In my opinion...
- It seems to me...
- Don’t use Subjunctive mood:
- I should...
- I could...
- I would...
- Don't use “if”
- Don’t use extra words. Shorter writing, better writing.
- Don’t use cliches about teaching and learning or share Unobjectionable ambitions:
- I believe every student should have the opportunity...
- No one should graduate without ...
- My aim in the classroom is to ensure that students are engaged and learning...
- Do not cite end of course evaluations as “proof” of yourteaching effectiveness.
- No future tense (except when talking future research) Use present tense. This is especially important for Grad students and new teachers. Do not say “I hope to do or I will do x, y, z.” Instead say, “I do x, y, z.” Present tense makes you sound like a colleague (not a graduate student).
- Don’t ever use luck (or privilege or divine intervention) to explain your success “I’ve been fortunate... I’ve been blessed... I’ve been lucky enough to... I’ve had the good fortune...” It sounds like false modesty in a format where you should be taking credit for your accomplishments and good decisions.
