On the other hand, when applying to a primarily undergraduate institution, where student—faculty interactions are their bread and butter, you would be wise to acknowledge that fact. Customize teaching statements for each institution—application review committees will notice if you are out of touch with their mission.
Learn more on the Blog. Classes may be large and small; consider the mechanisms you might use to help people learn in both contexts. Again, this is going to depend to some extent on the type of institution you are applying to. Some published advice will recommend thinking about the teaching and learning circumstances that worked for you. But take note: This is a perilous approach. Most students are not aiming for a Ph. You should explicitly acknowledge these differences and indicate your openness to the alternative approaches and techniques needed to reach a broad range of students.
It will be your job to teach the students and you may not have exactly the students you want! Participate in workshops and courses for faculty candidates. If you have the opportunity, take advantage of the fact that many institutions offer workshops or courses to help you prepare for life in the professoriate; they can also help with writing academic application documents, such as your teaching statement.
There may also be the opportunity to participate in a workshop that is held outside of your campus. For example, prior to every fall national meeting ACS offers the Postdoc to Faculty workshop, which helps postdocs transition to academic careers. These types of workshops and courses provide an opportunity to reflect on and discuss your ideas with others and can really help you formulate and clarify your ideas about teaching and learning. More to the point, taking part in such opportunities provides evidence for a sincere commitment to effective teaching.
Keep it focused and short: between one and two pages is appropriate. Remember that the search committee will possibly be reading hundreds of teaching statements.
Your readers will not be inclined to look favorably on a long, meandering discourse about your epistemological framework or on an exposition of why you care so much about students, particularly if you have never seriously engaged in teaching before.
Let's examine several of these by looking at the reflective statements from some of Western's award-winning teachers.
These should not be considered as mutually exclusive strategies. In fact, many instructors use a variety of these styles. This approach presents a general statement about what you see as the "job" of a university instructor.
You might consider what the instructor ideally should do in the classroom. How does this help the student to develop? Remember to keep your comments focused and to the point.
I am very cognizant of the need for undergraduate students to acquire specific knowledge while they develop the attitudes and skills that are essential to professional practice in nursing.
Most of my students are mature students, for whom relevance of subject matter to their chosen careers is highly valued. Most of my graduate students have had substantial experience as teachers and administrators and are looking for theory to explain, if not outright solve, the problems they encounter in practice.
My job, I believe, is to make the field come alive for the classes I teach, to demonstrate its centrality in the culture of the late twentieth century, and to instil a love for works that might initially appear intimidating in their neoclassicism or vexing in their satiric density. A teacher must have an intense passion for teaching. An effective teacher also has the will and the ability to show emotion, realizing that genuine emotions not only reveal his or her character, but also are an effective and personal means of communication.
And not least, a teacher must know the importance of being humble. Here, the individual outlines how and why he or she entered the profession of academia. This may be quite specific "My father was a customs officer and I became intensely interested in people's ability to lie" or very general "For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in helping students to learn".
Some questions for you to consider: Why did you become a university instructor? Who were your role models? What attracted you to your specific area of study? In my teaching, I start from the assumption that each student either has a similar fascination already and that my task is to help her follow it further, or that she has the potential to be as fascinated as I am, and that my job is to help her develop that enthusiasm for the subject matter.
In this approach, the instructor discusses specific examples of things she or he has done in the classroom. The focus here is not so much on a listing of activities as it is on a demonstration of pedagogical approach. In smaller settings I employ debates, role-playing, dialoguing, and mock trials or hearings--techniques that require students to 'sift through the evidence,' enabling them to adopt various perspectives and make defensible arguments for them.
However there are several things that I do in an attempt to be as effective as possible in the time available. I try to be organized so that both the student and I know what is coming, where we have been and what is expected. I also work hard at getting the students involved individually in the lectures and keeping them up to date in the course material.
I try to know everyone's name and I ask lots of questions in class. On a weekly basis, I hand out short problem sets and we hold sessions in which student volunteers present the answers on the board to the rest of the class.
The vetting of the problem sets can be quite time consuming, but I am convinced that it is one of the most effective things that I do". Karen provides a step-by-step process for developing a teaching statement.
You can follow along using this PDF. Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement. Core Areas What are your objectives as a teacher? Consider these writing prompts: Do you hope to foster critical thinking and problem-solving strategies, facilitate the acquisition of life-long learning skills, or prepare students to function effectively in an information economy?
What is your role in orienting students to a discipline, to what it means to be an educated person in your field? In what specific ways do you want to improve the education of students in your field? Are there discussions in academic journals or in professional organizations about shortcomings in the education of students today or unmet needs in the discipline and do you have ideas about how to address those shortcomings and needs? How will you achieve those objectives?
How will you measure your teaching effectiveness? Summary Responses to all of these questions will require some reflective thought and you will likely benefit from discussing them with other faculty in your department.
Play Video. A teaching statement, or statement of teaching philosophy, is important to search committees and is often a required component of faculty applications.
A teaching statement may also be used for applying for a teaching award or included in a dossier for tenure. Writing a teaching statement stimulates reflection, which improves your teaching by providing focus for your instructional strategies.
This can help you articulate, prioritize, and synthesize your ideas about teaching and learning for job talks. A teaching statement will ideally address multiple facets of teaching, such as desired learning outcomes, instructional techniques, classroom climate, and assessment methods. It is customary to write the statement in first person, but depending on your audience, there may be room for creativity, including the use of metaphor to describe your teaching.
Given the brief amount of time a search committee may have to look at your application, the statement should be a maximum of two-pages in length single-spaced and include an introductory paragraph, topic sentences that capture the main point of each paragraph, and a conclusion that ties the distinct facets of your statement together as a whole. Unless your statement is written explicitly for specialists, avoid technical terms. To aid you in writing your teaching statement, below we provide brief descriptions of five different teaching and learning topics to consider addressing in your statement.
It is not a strict requirement that the statement address all of these topics or be limited to them, but your statement should reflect the relative importance of these issues to your teaching.
In addition to the five aspects listed above, take a step back and consider your statement from a holistic perspective. Does your statement…. We offer one-on-one consultations for teaching statements and diversity, equity, and inclusion DEI statements. We bridge our pedagogical expertise with evidence-based practices to help you convey your teaching values and the instructional choices you make to help students achieve learning goals. In order to maximize our time together, we require you to upload a draft of your statement so we may review it ahead of time.
We welcome drafts at various stages in your writing process and offer feedback and suggestions for continued improvement.
0コメント