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Career Center :: Grad Student Home :: Get Employed :: Teaching Statements: "The Teaching Statement

Introduction

In general a teaching statement explains the basis for your desire to teach, your basic beliefs about what constitutes good teaching. the courses you are prepared to teach in addition to the ones requested/currently offered, and why you believe your subject is vital to the liberally educated citizen.

Preparation

* Enter notes into a teaching log/journal after each class session. Include notes on self presentation, content plans/questions/problems, student questions and your responses like this one:

“ ‘Um, I wanted to ask you. . .whether you think. . .that. . .um. . .being a feminist makes you. . .you know, narrow?’ Her eyes shoot up to mine…I know as they say, exactly where Shelley is coming from. It is a prominent feature of this student body, the philosophy that commitment to a belief system defines you, thus narrows you. They want all options open, no bridges burned; they also want no labels to hamper their social lives, to make them feel exposed, known, and categorized. I remember this. I remember myself at exactly this age, seeking a find of freedom and also a kind of shelter in fuzziness. In indefinition. I could be anything, and thus didn’t have to be anything in particular.” Gail B. Griffith. Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue. 1992.

* Ask students for evaluations in mid-course. Don’t wait until the summative end-of-course evaluation. Options: ask students to write down the steps they took to solve a problem, describe time/activities they took to prepare for a class session/test, respond briefly to a discussion question and exchange with peers before oral discussion period, write one-minute papers at the end of class on the main points/muddiest point.

* Get into the habit of peer assessment. Ask a peer/mentor to look at a videotape of a class for feedback, observe a series of classes, or interview your students about your strengths and weaknesses.

Content

Your teaching statement should discuss what you believe good teaching in your field is. It should include examples of real teaching moments where you have tried to practice your pedagogical values and methods. Eliminate truisms. Avoid coming across as arrogant or preachy. Make sure you create the impression of enthusiasm, conviction, and reflectiveness about your teaching as a scholarly task and a lively art. Review your teaching log and use journal scholarship on teaching in your field, the Duke Graduate School’s pedagogical development resources and internet resources to assess/articulate:

* Your identity as a teacher

Bearer of a Dying Tradition
Master/Expert
Authority
Challenger of Received Ideas
Connector
Orientator/Guide
Learning Coach
Cheerleader
Moderator/Mediator
Disciplinarian
Surrogate Parent
Counselor
Chum

* Your approach to the subject matter:

Course function in liberal education/ in your discipline
Key concepts
Content organization
Methods of presentation
Learning activities/desired learning outcomes
Ways to evaluate student progress

* Your attitude toward your students, their backgrounds, goals, expectations, learning/personal needs, their satisfaction/course evaluations, attitude toward students’ ideas and time, out-of-class interaction/service/field/laboratory learning

* Ask for feedback on your statement from experienced mentors.

Clips from Teaching Statements

Biology
I am a broadly trained biologist and am qualified to teach a diversity of existing courses and new courses to compliment the Oberlin biology curriculum. For all courses I would take a conceptual approach to organizing the material, and would aim to teach not only the subject matter itself, but how the subject matter can throw light on the process of science and what it means to be a scientist. In addition to Animal Behavior and Introductory Biology, I can offer seminar courses on the topics of Sexual Selection, Animal Communication, Invertebrate Biology, and Phylogeny, Ecology & Behavior. I am also interested in developing an interdisciplinary course in Women in Science, perhaps in collaboration with philosophy, history, or sociology faculty. For Animal Behavior, I believe that no one has improved on Tinbergen’s conceptual organization of the diverse approaches to the study of animal behavior and I would organize the course around his four questions of behavior: mechanism, development, current function, and evolution. Animal Communication is an excellent venue for evaluating each of these research approaches as it is a field of behavioral research in which each of these four areas is well developed. Sexual Selection is a good topic for giving students a taste of how scientific controversies develop and are resolved in the literature. Invertebrate Biology can provide a valuable understanding of the diversity of life and evolutionary patterns and processes. Phylogeny, Ecology & Behavior can convey the excitement of a quickly expanding field that brings new approaches to answering old questions. Women in Science is an excellent topic for exploring how science is affected by society and vice-versa. Judging from my experience in teaching at Cornell, I can look forward to learning more about each of these topics as I teach about them. It is this interplay between what we can offer to students and what we can learn from them that makes teaching such an exciting intellectual endeavor.

Musicology
I should underline here that the aesthetic discussions that I encourage are absolutely compatible with a traditional, canonical, work- or subject-oriented approach to music history, world music, or theory -- an approach that I fully support. Essentially, I embellish or ornament a traditional base with auxiliary material because it is important to make students aware of broader methodological issues -- for example, that some boundaries are expandable, and that musical compositions should be understood in context. I like to introduce women composers so that students are at least aware that there are some. It is also instructive to use different recordings of the same piece or to present a traditional recording in comparison with an 'authentically reconstructed' one and to let the students argue out the issues of which is better and why. When students feel that their opinions count and that it is alright to argue, they will engage in the process of learning, and it is these discussions that they will ultimately remember.

Because of my own experience as a liberal arts college graduate, I have never considered teaching and learning to be merely about facts, set only in the classroom, and concerning only the mind. This is just the surface level of education. A deeper --and more serious -- level concerns how the experience of learning the facts can instill a spirit of discipline, self-confidence, and love of the subject, of learning, of critical inquiry into the student who, in the vast majority of cases, will go on, not to study music, but follow other careers. Perhaps there is really no essential difference between sports, community events, outdoor activities, study abroad, classes, and all the other organized and unorganized events that take place in an academic context of the 'ethics of care': their ultimate goal should be to develop skills and values (whether physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual) that the entire academic community—students, faculty and staff-- can apply to other contexts throughout their lives.

Computer Science
In “Discrete Structures of Computer Science” students learn the fundamental mathematical concepts that are the basis for Computer Science. This was the first course I taught, and while the results were not terrible, both the students and I had criticisms of my performance. One key problem I encountered was that I overestimated the intellectual and academic maturity of the students. For example, I found that weekly quizzes were an insufficient means of keeping students 'on track' in the course. A second problem was that the programming assignments were too difficult. As a result of my software engineering background, I required not only that their programs be correct, but also well-designed.

In hindsight, I should not have attempted to address the problems students were having designing good programs. It distracted from the main objective of the course. When I discussed this issue with other faculty members, I quickly found that I was not the only person to notice the problem. Since then, the faculty has approved a new software development course (CSci 301) to help address the issue. I have been involved in its development, and will likely teach the course in the future.

I am looking forward to teaching CSci 243 again, because I believe that I can teach more effectively as a result of these lessons. For example, instead of weekly quizzes I will require students to turn in homework every lecture. In light of the new programming course, I plan to remove the programming component entirely, replacing it with a set of non-programming 'application' assignments.

For example, in one assignment students might apply concepts such as sets, functions, and recursion to write software specifications. In another assignment, students might learn how such specifications can be used to automatically check the correctness of software. In a later assignment, students may use graph theory to model a computer network, and apply algorithms taught in the class to compute properties of the network. Through such applied assignments, students will gain a deeper understanding of relationships between concepts taught in the class and real problems in Computer Science."