Teaching Philosophy

Transcription

nowadays even in the research intensive institution you're going to be teaching you're going to be working with student you want to think about what is it that i'm doing and how my going about that so people who are in P-F-F are at the formative stages of doing that they want to be thinking and articulating for themselves who am i really as a teacher i mean that's an ongoing process probably for a lot of people it's not even verbal if you know i mean it's it is something that you just kind of incorporate but in the preparing future faculty class or in workshops like that students are trying to articulate that specifically and we've seen right now you don't really know something until you can articulate it he's that leamnson has got that idea in the same way you articulate your teaching philosophy to yourself it helps with your own professional formation so that's what i mean by inside the outside reason of course is that more and more as i understand more and more hiring committees . . . committees are asking for not only statement of researcher research interests but also statement of teaching interest and a statement of teaching philosophy certainly here at Iowa State everybody when they come up for promotion and tenure or post-tenure review has got their personal responsibility statement which talks about their teaching and asks for a statement of teaching so i i think it's important in the formative stages it continues to be important as people enter professional realm and internally or personally and externally to the various audiences that take an interest in it it is really interesting to think about what the most important components would be in a teaching philosophy statement because those might change a little there at least gonna change on the surface for every single person who writes such a thing on the other hand there must be some kind of fundamental things that are going to be in there so i think maybe the most important component to teaching philosophy statement the first one evolve would be an honesty in internal honesty with yourself so that component is going to be to take the time to think through and determine fundamentally what is my identity as a teacher what am i doing as a teacher so it's really an attitude rather than a first paragraph or a second paragraph it's more that fundamental outlook that you take so the first component would certainly be that attitude the second one then would be the time put into it the thought what would these elements of of myself what would be statements about myself as a teacher whould look like how would i organize them so all of that kind of happens when you're asleep you're in the shower or some other time and probably if i were doing at teaching statement for the very first time i would just take notes as they occur to me and i wouldn't try to rush it it's possible that in a class you've got to come up with one in two or three weeks or something like that for that for the one that is true to me and good for outside people to look at i wouldn't want to rush it then beyond that this sort of affect to the attitude that you bring to the writing i do think it's extremely important when you've written it down to realize who your audiences are and i've mentioned already that your first audiences really sorta is yourself as you're developing ideas send a teaching philosophy statement to a hiring committee or with a dossier that is going out to help you get an academic job and it is probably not a good idea to be scolding the senior faculty who'll be reading that dossier as to how they ought to teach and because of that it really needs to be personal i do think that a lot of people are still very leery of using the first person right first-person in many of our disciplines still doesn't play much of a role in you know in academic writing in professional writing reports proposals often they won't use I you have to use I and not to tell people how everyone should teach but rather how i do you teach or what thoughts what insights that i bring to my teaching so not to sort of speak to globally or to generally teaching ought to be a blah blah blah or teaching is an art and not a science maybe a little bit of that might be useful but i would actually preface that to me comma teaching is an art and not a science and make it personal and individual that that's i think that would that would both fulfill the inside audience i was talking about before and also appeal to the outside audience because after all just as with cover letters or anything else somethings can be a turn-off if there's an attitude of I know better than you or i'm already i'm twenty five years old but i really know all there is to know about teaching that is going to be a turnoff to the external audience so i do think people have to just really remember the fundamentals who is your audience what is it that you're trying to do but at the same time be true to yourself it's difficult because of something i mentioned before that it's hard for some people in some fields to use first-person it's hard because it seems like boasting and I have spent more than twenty years at iowa state university we do iowa nice extremely well and people adapt our iowa nice with if they come here from all over the world we don't tend to blow our own horn and there's a little bit of horn blowing involved in writing that statement and you have to feel confident he have to show that confidence this is who i am as a teacher so i think it is hard to get started because the lack of confidence it might be hard to get started because this is not a usual genre that we write in and then the notion that the stakes here might be really really high do i get a job or not get a job do i get a job where i am a good fit and and a lot might be riding on the external portion of that statement so a way around that would be to write and write and i can write lots of lots of drafts and i have used since my earliest days as a teacher of english you can do something to kind of trick yourself i'm not really writing my teaching philosophy statement because look I have chosen purple i am typing in purple and when i'm writing it's not purple when i'm writing is not all caps when i'm writing it's not bedoni bold it's not italic there something like that and it's a hundred and eight points or do you know whatever it might be that breaks through that initial kind of writing block you have to get something down on paper it is so much easier to revise what you did then to do it in the first place so i think is a combination of things i have now written probably three or four i wrote one when i applied for the job at celt i wrote one when i had applied for a job i hold now for faculty director of the honors program the jobs influence what they looked like in that my stage of career my life stage determine what they look like and so maybe that's the most important thing to keep in mind if you're going to try to get away from if you feel they have writer's block you feel that it's hard to get started this isn't the last word about yourself as a teacher this is the first word about yourself as a teacher there's going to be a lot of words sometimes people ask me how you get started writing a teaching philosophy statement and I have talked to our center for excellence in learning and teaching about teaching philosophy statements as part of the broader teaching portfolio a often again if students are at the beginning stages of an academic career students who are in a preparing faculty program are are just beginning their teaching careers in general as well as just beginning to create the portfolio and to create the teaching philosophy statement so i do have some a questions that i offer or share that i think are good ways to get started not necessarily getting started with the writing but just getting started with the thinking and my favorite one i think is imagine that you're retiring and people are saying really nice things about you and what a wonderful teacher they are what are they saying and people have responded positive positively to that people have specifically told me all that was kinda funny that was sort of neat it also helps you get around the notion of i don't really want to say terrific things about myself i feel a little awkward in a too iowa nice to blow my horn but if you can imagine what would they say in twenty-fifty about what a great teacher you were it's not me saying that it's my imaginary students and colleagues saying that since they are imaginary they can say whatever they want I'll just write it down so there are a little tricks like that imagine what people would say about you imagine that you've gone home to your partner spouse friend and say boy i had a great day to day teaching oh really tell me about if you just imagine that conversation it might not work for everybody but that's the sort of icebreaker internally that can work for me when you think about how long a teaching philosophy statement should be i think you run into a couple of different roadblocks one is that because teaching philosophy statements are unique and specific they probably are going to be different lengths and a second element that makes that the answer to how long should a statement be it would be difficult to answer is that i'm sure that in some fields short and sweet is just absolutely appropriate and and others a more expansive discourse would be seen as more appropriate i've had the privilege of having people share some of their promotion materials with me as i've gone through my career and i've seen that in some of the natural sciences for example that teaching philosophy statement and this is not just a beginner but as you know someone who's advance somewhat in the field is probably about ten sentences maybe one paragraph maybe two really not very long it surprised me as someone who's in english as to just how brief that was my very first one was probably a page single spaced my most recent one and as an associate professor of some years standing was two pages single-spaced i can't imagine it being any longer than that i think it should probably be shorter than that so if people want a general something to aim for in general i would think that page single space if it's a little bit longer because you're more expansive or you've had more experience you have more specific things to say i think that's fine and then ends up a little bit shorter than that particularly because your discipline expects terseness then i think that's fine to and i think that too a great extent you're going to share this with people you don't simply put it in a drawer lock it away in this my teaching philosophy statement but why wouldn't you share drafts with people in your field or if you're currently a student you might share it with a faculty mentor a chair of your your thesis committee or what have you and i think they'd be able to give really field specific feedback particularly as to the length