Writing a Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Brian P. Coppola ()
Department of Chemistry, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1055
Submitted to: The Journal of College Science Teaching*
* While preparing this manuscript, I was contacted by the American Chemical Society's Department of Career Services, to provide a version of this that they might use to create a give-away pamphlet. This should be available in August, 2000 (contact information is included at the end of this manuscript). The Editor at the Journal of College Science Teaching was interested in this as an article, but the demands on the Journal meant that it needed to be reduced in size by 50%. Surprisingly, eliminating the collections of quotations from actual statements of teaching philosophy did not substantially diminish the manuscript, although I hope you will agree that it is richer with them rather than without them! I am posting, therefore, the original manuscript submitted to the Journal, which was reduced slightly for the American Chemical Society's purposes. The ACS version and the shortened JCST version are available from me on request.
Writing a Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Abstract
Writing a statement of teaching philosophy is a cornerstone of reflective and scholarly practice in teaching and learning. A strategic set of practical and philosophical guidelines is presented for experienced and novice educators to craft such a statement. Examples from authentic statements are used to illustrate the categories and ideas.
Introduction
Everyone who enters a classroom or other teaching situation has a philosophical framework (a teaching philosophy) that guides their practice, so it is ironic that writing down a statement of teaching philosophy outside of a job search is a relatively new practice in higher education. Significant publications on this topic did not appear until the 1990s (Goodyear and Allchin, 1998; Chism, 1997-98). Since 1994, I have been working with undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral chemistry students to improve the professional development infrastructure for future faculty (Coppola, 2000). Our work, done in the emergent area we call Interdisciplinary Studies at the Interface of Education (ISIE), focuses on discipline-centered teaching and learning, uses pedagogical content knowledge as its theoretical framework (Gess-Newsome and Lederman, 1999), and has the scholarship of teaching and learning as its vehicle (Shulman, 1999, Hutchings and Shulman, 1999). An important ISIE practice for experienced and future faculty alike is writing a statement of teaching philosophy, and in this article I want to share a set of strategic guidelines for developing such a statement.
As with other scholarly practices, committing your ideas to writing requires an added degree of reflection on one's purposes and intents. By writing a statement of teaching philosophy, you also make your thinking public, open to discussion or comment. This is a good thing. Whether you are a graduate student who is preparing materials to apply for your first faculty position, or whether you are an experienced faculty member, writing your statement of teaching philosophy codifies your thinking at a particular time. The teaching statement gives you a starting point for examining your teaching practices, allows you to share your ideas with others, and allows you to monitor the progress of your own development as a teacher. Additionally, a teaching statement is a great organizer for a course, curriculum or teaching portfolio, where you represent details about your teaching practices and your students' learning (Seldin, 1997; Cerbin, 1996; Hutchings, 1996; Eichinger and Krockover, 1998).
Along with a curriculum vitae, a research statement, and a cover letter, a statement of teaching philosophy is becoming an increasingly important piece in the materials that represent you as a faculty member (or a future faculty member). While this article is meant to assist experienced, inexperienced, and future faculty with writing their teaching statements, there are a couple of important caveats to consider. This guide is neither comprehensive, prescriptive, nor the last word. Indeed, a statement of teaching philosophy is an extremely personal text, and it should reflect and represent its author as an individual. I hope that these guidelines and suggestions will help authors of teaching statements to organize their thinking in useful and strategic ways.
Throughout this article I have included excerpts from actual statements of teaching philosophy that have been published on the World Wide Web. These were uncovered by searching on "teaching philosophy" with the Infoseek search engine (www.infoseek.com). URLs are provided as citations along with the name, department, and institution of the individual author as of July, 2000. Although the shelf life for these citations, and even the original statements, is likely to be short, I think it is important to capture a snapshot of faculty thinking about statements of teaching philosophy by using their own words. Any uncited excerpts are from the author's personal statement. Finally, I have intentionally included in these quotations what I consider to be poorer examples along with the better ones, and I leave this evaluation up to the reader's own sensibility. I thank collectively those individuals whom I have quoted for making their philosophies open and available to all of us.
What is a Teaching Philosophy?
Just because you have never written a statement of your teaching philosophy does not mean that you do not have a teaching philosophy. If you engage a group of learners who are your responsibility, then your behavior in designing their learning environment must follow from your philosophical orientation. So, like it or not, you have a teaching philosophy! What you need to do is discover what it is and then make it explicit. What you can gain from writing your philosophy down is a clearer understanding about your own thinking. Of course, this process can also reveal inconsistencies, incompleteness, and even errors that you want to correct.
A written teaching philosophy answers a direct question that has multiple facets, namely, what is teaching and learning to you? This complex question can be broken down into the following categories, accompanied by a set of appropriate questions to help direct your thinking.
Theoretical Framework: How does learning take place?
This question should feel like a challenge because it is. Most faculty members do not have any background in educational theory. Indeed, faculty can be disdainful and suspicious of discussions about educational theory because it is so outside of their experience. Fortunately, you can still write your teaching statement if you are in that group! First, think deeply about more and less productive episodes of learning (not teaching) that you have been a part of, and then try to capture the essence of those experiences to guide your thinking about designing instruction. Many people find it useful to think of a metaphor that can capture the spirit of a successful learning experience. Are students empty vessels into which instructors pour well-organized information? Are students members of the learning team where instructors are the coaches? In any case, be prepared to add a sentence or two of explanation about your metaphor so that readers get the sense of what you mean. A theoretical framework can have multiple targets. For instance, one statement might assume an individual learner is it focus, while another might proceed from the idea that groups of learners are key. Alternatively, an institution's mission and how it allocates its resources might be the framework selected by someone else. In the following three passages, taken from authentic statements, notice how rapidly you can get a sense of the individual authors and their relationship to teaching and learning. Again, these excerpts have not been selected for their excellence, but rather to give you a range of choices that have been made by people writing their teaching philosophies.
My philosophy is based on a proposition that "Teaching is about Learning." This means that to improve teaching I must focus on the learning needs of the future that will be shaped by today's students…. Learning is not something that can be defined as a procedure; learning is something occurs in a rather unstructured and ad-hoc way. However, learning can be built into structures and processes. As we make new connections between known concepts, add new strategies, link those new concepts to old concepts, then we begin to learn and our body of knowledge grows. Thus, knowledge is a web of concepts with a whole lot of connections between them. (Jambekar, 2000)
In the sciences in particular, students must acquire a working knowledge of the fundamental principles and associated terminology of a given area. Much of this must be memorized. The "facts and jargon" must be presented in a highly organized fashion, showing the necessary connections, but without overwhelming the student with quantity at any one time. (Powell, 2000)
The primary purpose of U.S. colleges and universities should be teaching, not the preparation of professional athletes. So the question is: How are we to assure that the brightest students select science as a major in college and then as their career? The answer is clear; quality undergraduate education must be made a high priority…. I posit that all teaching opportunities should be founded on the idea of individual inquiry by the student. This principle makes education a learner-centered process, not one that is teacher-centered. Individual inquiry does not necessarily mean undergraduate research, but it could. The central goal of this pedagogy is to empower students in their education by providing dynamic learning situations and exciting research opportunities. (Wallace, 2000)
Goals: What can a student get out of your courses?
Instructional goals are an important starting point in your instructional design. Goals are often construed naively as a syllabus of topics ("Students will learn the Crossed Cannizzaro reaction during lecture number 24," for instance). In your statement of teaching philosophy, you should not only consider examples of what subject matter items you think students should learn, but also some of the broader issues that add value to the education students can be expected to obtain by working with you. You might also consider the question of why these goals are important. It is useful to think in terms of three levels of educational goals represented by these three questions.
What goals do you have for students as learners in the specific subject matter?
What goals do you have for students as learners in chemistry, as a science, and as science learners, in general?
What goals do you have for students as learners in general, within the liberal arts educational framework where chemistry sits?
My goals as a teacher are rooted in my scientific objectives. As a scientist my objective is to provide information to help individuals and agencies responsible for land management to make sound and ecologically based decisions. Along with informing scientists and land managersof important results, I must also do my part to educate the public, especially future generations of voters. I have addressed this goal by gaining experience as a science educator at a wide variety of levels. (Hopkins, 2000)
My teaching goal is to link course performance with the development of general learning skills, general chemical science skills, and specific subject matter skills. For instance, I want students to derive meaning from new information in a way that engages a variety of learning strategies and the ability about how to make an appropriate choice about what strategy to use. In the subject matter, I want students to understand the development of the molecular structural model in chemistry (from constitution to connectivity, and then the three dimensional aspects of conformation and configuration).
Why does chemistry seem so hard to a typical college student?… The first goal in teaching any subject is to have a solid curriculum and to provide the students with the framework of knowledge. I strongly believe that in chemistry the understanding of concepts and the ability to solve problems should be emphasized over memorization…. How should the transmission of information take place?… Ultimately, the goal of education is learning, not teaching. I believe that students should be stimulated to think on their own. (Gamamick, 2000)
Design and Implementation: How do you plan to accomplish your goals?
Design and implementation are different. You can have a good plan (the skill) but still not be able to enact it (the will) (Paris, 1983; Paris, 1983; McKeachie, 1994). This is because teaching is a complex social activity that requires physical and emotional behaviors in addition to just a good idea. A smoker who decides to quit for lots of good reasons demonstrates the skill, or understanding, of what to do, but this alone does not constitute the behavioral will to enact the plan. Once you have constructed your instructional goals, you need to address how you think you can help students accomplish them. This is the first time when your reader will look for congruence, or alignment, in your thinking. Your design and implementation plans should clearly reflect and be informed by your goals. If your goals emphasize higher level learning but your design looks like a plan for students to memorize and feed back large amounts of factual information, then your reader might conclude that you have not thought deeply about your ideas. A short narrative snippet of a teaching situation can be quite effective in revealing your thinking about instructional design and implementation.