Speaker 1: This week on Engage the Sage. Hi everyone, I'm Don Saucere. Welcome to this week's episode of Engage the Sage. This week, we're gonna talk about how to write excellent statements of our teaching philosophy. Now, these teaching statements are often used when we apply for teaching jobs, when we apply for tenure and promotion, and when we apply for teaching awards. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about recommendations for how you can make these excellent. Over the years, I've written several versions of my statement of teaching philosophy. I've also served in hiring committees and award selection committees. And I'm gonna take that experience and I'm gonna provide you five recommendations for making your statement of your teaching philosophy excellent. My first recommendation for having an excellent statement of your teaching philosophy is to actually have an excellent teaching philosophy. It's possible you have not thought about your teaching philosophy or had the opportunity to articulate your teaching philosophy prior to writing your first teaching statement. That's great, this is a wonderful opportunity to think that through and to get that down in a way that you will be able to promote yourself for all of your teaching goals. And thinking about your teaching philosophy, you wanna think about who you are as a teacher. What do you wanna teach? What do you want your students to learn? What practices are you going to employ to promote your students' learning? If you're relatively new to teaching, and even if you're not, you might wanna think about your experiences as a student. When did you learn best? What did teachers really do to help you learn the content? What did teachers do to let you know that you were cared for and promoted your success? What did they do to help you engage in your learning? Now, I think the foundation of your teaching philosophy just at its root should be the promotion of student learning and student success. That's where we all should start. If we're not starting there, we might wanna really think about whether teaching is something we wanna be doing, but I think it needs to start there. After that though, I think it becomes more individualized and unique. In describing your teaching philosophy, one of the things I'm gonna recommend in this kind of sub recommendation is use teaching language. So you're going to use terms like active learning and engagement and student success and accessibility and inclusivity, but you're gonna use these terms and you're going to mean them. As I'm gonna talk about in a little bit, the things that you say are important to you have to manifest in your practices. Also, in having an excellent teaching philosophy, I think you should name your teaching philosophy. You should make it individualized and unique for you. It should become part of your teaching identity. So for instance, I've named various parts of my teaching philosophy, things like the choice to learn, bringing peace to the classroom and trickle down engagement, better known as engage the sage. And if you wanna hear more about any of these, check out our other videos. So at this point, you should have an excellent teaching philosophy. So that teaching philosophy is now gonna be the foundation for the statement you write about your teaching philosophy. Now, that statement is written toward a goal. And my second recommendation is to know the goal and write to the goal for that teaching statement. Teaching statements are written with a purpose. The purpose might be to get the job. It might be to get promotion or tenure. It might be to win the award. And one of the things I would make sure that I do in writing an excellent teaching statement is to know the responsibilities, know the components, know the formatting, know the length, know the things that people are gonna want in that teaching statement for whatever their goal I'm writing to is. So do your homework, find out what's supposed to be in there. Find out, for instance, if you're applying for a teaching job, the names of the classes you'd be teaching. Find out how are you gonna fit in the curriculum. If it's an award and they ask you to speak to a number of different components, maybe your philosophy, your practices, your assessment techniques, whatever, make sure that those are in there. So make sure you've done your homework and your teaching statement is actually written toward that goal. The third recommendation for writing excellent statements of your teaching philosophy is to show your audience your philosophy. Don't just tell them what your philosophy is. Show your audience, show the people reading your statement of your teaching philosophy, how your teaching philosophy manifests in the practices in your class. So how does it show up on your syllabus? How does it show up in your interactions with your students? How does it show up in your course policies? How does it show up in your assessments? How does it show up in the assignments and the student learning outcomes that you have for your students? It's not enough to just say that it's important to you. It's not enough to just say that you will do it. Show evidence that you actually do it. Some of the things you wanna be thinking about in showing that you actually do these things is your statement of teaching philosophy should be written using first person and active language. I'm a huge fan of using more verbs than adjectives. Tell me what you're doing. Don't just say you do amazing things. Show that that teaching language that you used earlier, those words like active learning and engagement, inclusivity, accessibility, promotion of student success, show that you really believe in those by having those actually dictate the practices and the things you do in your class. One of the things that really stands out for me when I read an excellent teaching statement is when I get a sense of what it would be like to be a student in that person's class. If I can have a moment in your classroom, that really stands out to me and lets me know that I'm talking about an excellent teacher here. The fourth recommendation in writing excellent teaching statements is to use the four Cs of writing. The four Cs of writing, and I teach this to my undergraduates, teach my graduate students, is your writing should be clear, complete, concise, and compelling. If you write and you're clear, you're complete, you're concise and compelling, you're probably gonna write something I wanna read. And one of the things that a teaching philosophy should be is inspiring. It really should be compelling. It should let me know that you're the kind of person I would wanna take a class from. You're the kind of person I would want my students to take a class with. So really use those to help you make that document come alive on the page. My fifth recommendation for writing excellent teaching statements is to use your mentors and colleagues to provide feedback to you. This is not something you have to do on your own. I'm sure you have people in your teaching circles and in your networks who are willing to provide feedback on these kinds of things. Ask them to read it. Ask them for their recommendations. Ask them for their advice. Ask if they believe the things that you're saying. Ask if they see the examples as being a true demonstration of what it is that you do as a teacher. When they've given you feedback, and you should find the best teachers you can to provide feedback on this, when they've given you feedback, it's also gonna alleviate some of that anxiety we might have about why we're writing that teaching statement in the first place. We might be nervous about applying for those jobs. We might be nervous for applying for tenure and promotion. We might be nervous being nominated for a teaching award. So it helps a conversation for also to manage any of the anxiety that goes along with the thing that made us write that teaching statement in the first place. So hopefully now, if you've been paying attention, you have five recommendations that are gonna help you write excellent teaching statements for all the purposes that you need those for. And I've really enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you about that today. Now, writing teaching statements is intimidating, right? It's really hard for us to kind of put those thoughts, and sometimes the thoughts are very personal, about why it is we teach and how it is we teach. But what we have is an opportunity to share our teaching perspectives with an audience that may not know about those. It's really a wonderful way for us to share our ideas with someone who will hopefully be impressed and inspired by the kinds of things that we do in our teaching. And it's a wonderful reflective experience for us to kind of sit down and decide what is our teaching identity. I found that writing statements of my teaching philosophy has made me a better teacher, as if I just started to think about, well, this is something I think that's important to me. Is it really showing up in my practices? And if it's not, maybe I need to revise some of those practices. So I think this is a wonderful reflective exercise to engage in. Like I said, we often do it for a goal, and we have the opportunity to share our teaching thoughts with other people, which I think we should do a lot more of. It can start that conversation and continue that conversation about teaching that is so important to all of us being better teachers. So my last recommendation is, I recommend that you enjoy writing the statement of your teaching philosophy. This is a wonderful experience for you, and it's gonna be a wonderful experience for the people who have the opportunity and the privilege to read it. Thank you for joining us this week on Engage the Sage. In the comments below, I would love to hear any questions you have about writing statements of teaching philosophy. I'd also love to hear any advice that you give to others about writing statements of teaching philosophy. And if you have any really cool tips for what teaching philosophy should look like, I'd love to see those too. 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