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Teaching Tools
2. Teaching Practices
2.5. Scope and Content
Developing Your Teaching Philosophy
Having just survived another academic year, you may find yourself with enough spare time to plan ahead just a little and think about your goals and purposes.
While flexible time may still not be plentiful, it is usually easier to find in the summer and you may find yourself becoming a bit more reflective about your teaching as well as your research. If you anticipate becoming a faculty member in the next year or two, you may want to begin now to reflect seriously on your teaching philosophy.
As teaching skill becomes a more important criterion in academic job searches, an increasing number of institutions ask candidates to submit a "statement of teaching philosophy" or "teaching statement" as part of their application. Statements of teaching philosophy are also a common component of the teaching portfolios that over 200 institutions now use in evaluating their faculty. Here are a few pieces of advice for beginning the process of developing and writing your teaching philosophy.
Tips for developing and writing your teaching philosophy:
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Keep it short
- Search committees read hundreds of applications for most tenure-track positions, so your goal is a concise 1-2 page statement organized around at most 1-2 main ideas. The challenge is to be specific and vivid enough to say something important about your teaching which can be conveyed in that space.
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Be concrete
- Sometimes the goal of stating their "philosophy" leads people to adopt an abstract writing style which states only general principles. Some faculty on search committees distrust such abstract statements because they tend to sound somewhat naive. Some will question any ideas which do not seem to be grounded in teaching experience. If you include brief examples of how your approach plays out in your courses, you help readers to visualize your teaching style and see the depth of your convictions.
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Whenever possible, be discipline specific
- While many teaching strategies transcend disciplinary boundaries, most faculty members serving on search or evaluation committees view teaching as more skillful when it is adapted to the demands of the specific discipline or course material.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
