Although I am well along in my academic career and have regularly taught graduate and undergraduate courses, a series of professional idiosyncrasies have meant that until last year I had never written a teaching statement.
As a faculty member at a research university, I was certainly acquainted with the ostensible purposes of those documents. For reasons that will become apparent, however, it had been some time since I could work up the enthusiasm to read one from beginning to end.
A preliminary clarification is in order. When I disparage "teaching philosophies" or "teaching statements," I am referring to those accounts that faculty members and job candidates are expected to produce to detail their approach to teaching. The statements are typically demanded at key moments in our professional lives, such as when we apply for jobs, tenure, or promotion. So I am concerned here with formal institutional documents, not self-motivated reflections about teaching.
When informed I had to produce a teaching statement in order to apply for promotion to full professor, I did my research. I scrutinized the dossiers of applicants and read a cross section of sample teaching philosophies posted on the Web sites of disciplinary societies. Along the way I learned a few new things and had some suspicions reinforced.
The first insight was that, as a literary genre, these documents are as drab as they are predictable. The majority are dominated by abstract appeals to unobjectionable ambitions. They ritualistically invoke a desire to teach "critical thinking," but offer little concrete guidance as to how that might be accomplished. Their authors disavow assuming the status of "expert." They appeal to collaborative learning, embrace "diverse learning styles," bring their own research into the classroom, disdain established canons, incorporate marginalized voices, recount personal teaching epiphanies, and acknowledge personal mentors, most of whom would be unknown to the committee members reading the file.
In five minutes, anyone who has spent time in academe could compile a comparable list of such platitudes, the worst of which veer toward sentimental treacle. The themes are so generic that I flirted with simply passing off someone else's teaching philosophy as my own. Who would notice? Indeed, many sample statements are explicitly presented as models for others to "emulate."
The first suspicion that there is something insincere about teaching statements derives from the fact that almost every author professes to love teaching. Cumulatively, this pandemic of instructional ardor strikes a dissonant note when compared with the routine activities of academics, many of whom spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to secure release time from teaching. That is, when they're not complaining about the petty hassles of coordinating teaching assistants, dealing with "grade grubbers," writing reference letters for undergraduates they could barely identify in a police lineup, evaluating essays, ordering textbooks, completing copyright permission forms, revising syllabi, learning the latest instructional software, and worrying about the time all of that takes away from other academic pursuits. Such grumblings dominate the hallway conversations of most faculty members I know.
Teaching statements are justified as a mechanism to evaluate classroom ability but are poorly suited for that purpose. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how someone could ever get one wrong. How horrible would a teaching philosophy have to be for it to be a principal factor in precluding an applicant from securing a job or being promoted?
The most intractable problem with teaching philosophies is that they are literary exercises, and it is an open question as to whether someone who writes an inspiring one is actually a good teacher. Authors of impressive statements have demonstrated that they are good at the keyboard, not necessarily in the classroom.
In the interest of honesty it is best to acknowledge that teaching statements are an opportunity—both an invitation and a compulsion—for academics to speak for their institution. Teaching philosophies are a performance, a ritualized symbolic moment in which professors are expected to articulate the university's proclaimed values in its preferred rhetoric.
Such ceremonies are commonplace in academe. This year, for example, I attended a meeting at which our unit was discussing our self-study report. We had included a statement identifying our commitment to "participatory learning." Someone asked what that actually meant, while others chatted about whether nonparticipatory learning was even possible. None of the approximately 18 academics assembled admitted having a clue as to what the concept entailed. But we were informed that our university publicly endorses "participatory learning," and that we would be wise to align ourselves accordingly.
Most complex organizations contain comparable rituals, when members are expected to speak for their institutions. If anything is unique about universities in that regard it is that academics often pride themselves on their antiestablishment orientation and profess to see such bureaucratic dictates for what they are. How is it, then, that so many smart and often intractable people fall into lock step and produce barely distinguishable teaching statements?
Part of the answer pertains to the fact that the documents are demanded only when academics are evaluated for jobs or career advancement. People in such contexts naturally tend to be risk averse. Moments of high-stakes decision making produce a built-in incentive for applicants to reproduce familiar ways of saying unobjectionable things. If a candidate's file is otherwise acceptable, why court disaster by straying from the teaching-philosophy script? That tendency makes the documents both uncontroversial and innocuous.
Another reason that teaching statements err on the side of homogeneity is that they are more important to the institution than to the individual. At a time when administrators face increased consumerist pressures, the simple existence of a requirement that instructors produce teaching statements is fundamentally important. Administrators can point to the documents as further evidence that their university takes teaching seriously. Thus, a key purpose of the statements is performed long before any faculty member sits down to write one.
Still, teaching statements could provide an opportunity for instructors to formally reflect on their aims, strategies, and tactics in the classroom. They could conceivably tell us a good deal about each individual while also providing pragmatic tips that could be used by other instructors.
Unfortunately, the abstraction that predominates in teaching statements works against their being more useful. The abstraction could flow from their being characterized as a "philosophy," or it might simply reflect tendencies in the social sciences and humanities more generally. Either way, all of the decontextualized claims about the aims and nature of teaching point us in the wrong direction. Implicit in writing these statements is the assumption that we can ruminate on the truths and ideal forms of teaching from the confines of our offices, and that once we have solved teaching as an intellectual puzzle, we can go forth into the real world to make our philosophy real.
But the inescapable fact is that teaching is a highly contextual and increasingly constrained activity.
There are too many constraints to list them all here, but some examples will make the point. University teaching is constrained by tables bolted to classroom floors; hundreds of students in a classroom; the need to evaluate students, and for them to evaluate us; unrelenting grade escalation; official requirements to produce increasingly formal, legalistic, and binding course outlines; increasing numbers of students who also hold paying jobs; research-ethics protocols that make it more difficult for students to conduct self-directed research on topics they find personally interesting; a sense that it has become anathema to fail students; exasperating appeal procedures for students caught cheating; and the fact that teaching is only one thing for which professors are evaluated.
I am not making a naïve, anarchic appeal here to remove all factors that structure how we teach. I'm making a plea to put such factors in the foreground, to take them seriously when thinking about university teaching. These are the real-world contexts in which teaching occurs. They are what instructors work with, around, and sometimes against.
Rather than write statements that offer unobjectionable but not very useful bromides, why not start to recognize the craftlike attributes of teaching? This promises to be a more useful strategy because the knowledge possessed by artisans is knowledge in practice. Artisans must think concretely about how to work with assorted textures, forces, and tensions inherent in their materials, deploying skills developed through repeated practice and working with tools designed with specific uses in mind.
As instructors, what tools and materials are at our disposal? Which tactics are useful, when, and why? Instructors couldn't just say they encourage collaborative learning. Instead, they need to say, specifically, how that is accomplished. What mix of moral suasion, coercion, personal demeanor, clock management, spatial arrangements, and so on allow an instructor to make collaboration work, for both our wide-eyed and deeply cynical students?
This, then, is a plea for greater specificity in reflections on the techniques and tactics used in teaching. I have learned almost nothing useful from the smattering of statements that I have read, but my students and I have benefited enormously from pragmatic lessons that colleagues have passed along about how they coordinate assignments over the course of a term, train teaching assistants, craft course outlines, remember students' names, and organize online resources.
As to my own predilections, I will not profess to love teaching. Teaching is something that only the most Panglossian can love tout court. It is a multidimensional activity comprised of countless diverse tasks. Some of those undertakings I enjoy immensely, others are tedium defined, and still others produce what I fear will be life-shortening aggravation.
My hope is that we can reduce one such aggravation by transforming the empty "teaching philosophy" ritual into an evolving set of useful, nitty-gritty reflections on how to best teach university students. Such a change could make one instance of academic busywork a genuinely meaningful exercise.
Comments
1. kerr7920 - February 19, 2010 at 07:59 am
My first thought is that if Mr. Haggerty were applying for a position in my department at a teaching-focused institution, his application wouldn't make the first cut. His essay reveals the very profound but unrecognized divide between the me-focused values of large research institutions and the student-focused values of faculty at good teaching-centered colleges. While it is true that the vast majority of teaching statements contain nothing but a string of platitudes, it does not follow that it is not possible for a teaching statement to demonstrate that a candidate is a thoughtful, reflective teacher. The standout teaching statements I have read are already doing what Mr. Haggerty is recommending in his conclusions. Perhaps the presence of these kind of statements has escaped Mr. Haggerty's notice because he works at an institution where most faculty view teaching as an unfortunate but necessary job requirement, but a distraction from their primary focus on their own narrow research agendas.
2. ksledge - February 19, 2010 at 08:11 am
"Instructors couldn't just say they encourage collaborative learning. Instead, they need to say, specifically, how that is accomplished."
Yes, that is what a good teaching statement/philosophy does. I agree with kerr7920--good statments already do this. Did the author really find NO statements that do such a thing?
3. tess58 - February 19, 2010 at 08:52 am
I agree with #1 and #2. In fact, part of my teaching philosophy is teaching my grad students how to write a solid teaching statement. By the time they are applying for jobs, they have well thought out statements with solid examples of what works for them in the classroom.
4. chriscross - February 19, 2010 at 09:07 am
Maybe part of the reason you couldn't find good examples is that teaching statements (and teaching) just don't matter in P&T at research institutions.
5. khaggert - February 19, 2010 at 09:12 am
#1 seems to concede the major point of the essay when she says "the vast majority of teaching statements contain nothing but a string of platitudes"
6. khaggert - February 19, 2010 at 09:28 am
Typo in my message above. Should read s/he.
7. maxey - February 19, 2010 at 09:32 am
Like #1, I too am at a teaching-focused institution but find my thoughts much more in line with Professor Haggerty's meaning that, in general, current and prospective faculty members are smart enough to ascertain a particular institution's "culture" related to teaching and to craft a statement of "personal teaching philosophy" that is entirely consistent. Not always, but often this is just another form of PC behavior in the academy. As a dean, I find it more useful to identify areas of challenge or weakness identified in student evaluations and peer reviews of teaching, and as faculty members preparing their personal teaching statements to address these.
8. 11134078 - February 19, 2010 at 10:17 am
Throughout a too-long career, my "teaching statement" remained unchanged. "I aim ta larn em good."
9. whip2038 - February 19, 2010 at 10:21 am
Yes, teaching philosophies with unsupported statements about critial thinking and collaborative learning are just a bunch of hand-waving. Absolutely! Those go right in the trash when we do a faculty search at my university. The authors cynicism is warranted, but fails to make the connection that these are simply unacceptable and should hold himself and his colleagues to a higher standard.
10. sabbatical - February 19, 2010 at 11:08 am
I do believe that comment No. 1 was written by the emperor who was shown, by Mr. Haggerty's spot-on article, to have no clothes.
11. doriemunson - February 19, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Bravo 11134078! Whether you are serious or not, thanks for the chuckle. Your comment reminds me of one of my grad school advisors who sadly passed away many years ago and yet operated pretty much along the same lines of thought. I remember him saying, when asked to articulate his philosophy of teaching..."Just do it" and I think that was before the Nike ad campaign.
12. 11122741 - February 19, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Poor Professor Haggerty; seems lots of folks out there have drunk the Carnegie koolaid and have not really ever looked at the research on teaching on the college level; is there one study that should a correlation between teaching philosophy and teaching practice or that a prof's explicitly stated teaching philosphy influences student outcome of any kind ....yeah, that's what I thought. This is not to say that there is not value, as prof Haggerty says, in reflecting and coming to some kind of resolution for one's self on various teaching issues and problems in the classrom today ...but those statements are not going to look like the compulsory and standard CYA rhetoric that is in these statements because tuitions are 3 times too high and there are too many lawyers out there making up work which have nothing or little to do with faculty salaries. When a college education was much, much, much cheaper you didn't have all of these problems or issues and everyone was much, much more laid back and tolerant as students and parents didn't have 100 grand to 200 grand on the table. FYI, the average prof doesn't make that much more than the average high school teacher but college cost 10 time more than that portion of a parents property tax that goes to a high school education (roughly 6k nationally) and is a fixed cost if the parent has more than 1 kid in the high school. Higher ed greed (and not by faculty) and shifting costs and looting parents is thew source of the tensions and much of the rhetoric and having the platitudes in the files and to mail to parents. Jesus bring back the 60's please; I can't stand 4/5's of the people I work with today. Yeah, prof Haggerty for even suggesting the turth.
13. jlambrec - February 19, 2010 at 02:21 pm
There will be more evidence that colleges/universities care about the quality of teaching when they ask that faculty/teaching applicants actually have some preparation to teach beyond the applicants' roles as successful students. As it is, there is general distain for the parts of universities that do prepare teachers--low status, low salaries, and general criticism about the quality of teaching elsewhere. If one can be assumed to be able to teach based on having received a Ph.D. in a content area, why are we surprised that teaching is both not their favored job activity nor one they do very well. Teaching well is becoming increasing difficult considerting the instructional facilities and roadblocks that make teaching difficult, not the least of which is the current expectation on the part of students that they have paid dearly for a credential and expect, at least, to be entertained as they sit through large lecture courses.
14. philosophy - February 19, 2010 at 03:32 pm
Platitudinous teaching statements don't help (at a teaching institution like mine) applicants to be invited for an interview, and those with more specifics do. And the statements can be supplemented with student and peer teaching evaluation data; and in an on-campus interview there can be incisive queries; and interviewees can be required to actually teach a class - instead of reading a paper to faculty!
15. cwinton - February 19, 2010 at 05:28 pm
Face it ... the teaching statement is just another example of a bureaucratic requirement for the benefit of administrators who need to be able to say "our faculty does this, or our faculty does that," generally to cover their own rear ends from increasingly testy funding sources, whether parents, foundations, or legislatures. It clearly has little impact on teaching, or any other aspect of faculty life. It is just another expectation evolving within the accountability game, which is consuming increasing amounts of the one thing academics should value the most, their time.
16. drmink - February 19, 2010 at 09:45 pm
I tend to agree with the author. They tend to be useless (who would ever make a comment that would be considered 'controversial' given their weight in critical personnel decisions) and there is no way to really be truthful and still be humble. Even at a "teaching institution" they tend to be nothing more than obligatory BS.
17. rhetoricat - February 19, 2010 at 11:51 pm
While I am certain that there are plenty of "teaching statements" that contain meaningless platitudes and generalizations, I have read quite a few that are astute, specific, and give a fairly good representation of how someone teaches. Perhaps I am a bit biased. I am on the job market this year and feel particularly proud of my own teaching statement/philosophy. My statement reflects my true feelings about teaching, which includes a deep love of the practice even though I am certainly guilty of complaining about my work even though I love it. Unlike the examples that the author is referring to, my teaching philosophy includes specific examples of how I integrate my approach into the classroom environment. I use components of narrative to reflect on how I became a teacher and how my teaching has evolved. In writing my teaching philosophy I followed the same principles that I teach my students. I considered my audience; I carefully contemplated what I felt was the most important information; and I revises, revised, revised until I was happy with it.
18. kerr7920 - February 20, 2010 at 08:18 am
The problem with Mr. Haggerty's essay is that it singles out one part of the application and asserts that it is universally of no value. He could just have easily written an essay entitled "research statements are bunk" or "letters of recommendation from dissertation committees are bunk." In each of these cases, I find far it far more common that these contain statements that lack credibility. Every dissertation is "ground-breaking" and is going to change the field. What I see too often in the applications of candidates just emerging from big research institutions is a perspective so narrow that both applicant and advisor inflate the significance of these first research projects to levels that call the judgement of both applicant and advisor into question.
19. derekbruff - February 20, 2010 at 02:26 pm
In their 2008 study, Meizlish and Kaplan surveyed hundreds of faculty hiring committees in six different disciplines. They found that teaching statements containing vague platitudes are not valued by hiring committees. Instead, committees value teaching statements that link teaching philosophies to specific teaching practices and experiences. Stories and anecdotes from the classroom--ones that illustrate one's experience implementing one's teaching philosophy--carry a lot of weight.
So the comments by whip2038 (#9 above) are spot on according to the research that has been done on this topic. I'll add that I replicated the Meizlish & Kaplan study in mathematics and found very similar results. My study is available online through the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001308p.pdf.
Reference: Meizlish, D. and Kaplan, M. (2008). Valuing and evaluating teaching in academic hiring: A multi-disciplinary, cross-institutional study. Journal of Higher Education 79(5), 489-512.
20. zefelius - February 21, 2010 at 02:21 am
As for sincerity, I don't think it is perforce connected to teaching effectiveness. I am fairly certain that I would not hold a job today, no matter how tenuous it is, if I were entirely honest in my views apropos of social justice, diversity, and the "necessity" for passion in my approach to teaching. Nevertheless, I will continue to put forth the greatest effort to "reach out" to my students and "make a difference" so that I will continue to receive very high student evaluations, peer reviews, and the occasional award or award nomination. As a lecturer in a work environment which privileges grade inflation and ego-coddling much more than the education of our students in the most rigorous manner, I think I will continue to write teaching statements pervaded with semi-spontaneous platitudes and just the right amount of concrete specifics if that means that I will continue to survive in our present day precarious job market. Despite the hypocrisy, I don't think this makes me ineffective at my job--and perhaps I am not the only one.
21. translogistique - February 21, 2010 at 06:06 am
In developing a teaching phillosophy for a specialization in business, I considered that it translates to the sum total of your teaching innovations and approaches that I acquired in delivering the program. It makes a difference between courses that are traditional and others that is a new breed in the program.
i-FUN (Intelligent Friends in the University Network) transformed the whole way of professional teachinng in logistics.
22. witten426 - February 21, 2010 at 10:40 am
this is pathetic. I had no idea we were in such trouble.
a chemist would never"disdain" traditional cannons.
23. commarts - February 21, 2010 at 01:26 pm
witten426 - February 21, 2010 at 10:40 am wrote: "this is pathetic. I had no idea we were in such trouble.
a chemist would never'disdain' traditional cannons."
Me neither. Traditional cannons are very useful in firing warning shots or just blowing away one's opposition.
Anyhow, I find some of what Haggerty wrote to be worth considering as much as some of the comments. It seems that context and audience are important considerations when it comes to teaching statements. Early in grad school, I was encouraged to write a teaching statement, and then I have subsequently revised it over the years in accordance with what I have learned as an educator, from working at at R1 institution to where I am now at a small, private liberal arts college. As the parameters of my job changed, so too have certain (but not all) aspects of my teaching philosophy.
24. performance_expert - February 21, 2010 at 05:06 pm
Being required to write propaganda is degrading and over time considerably maligns one from personal mission of doing good work. It is like they require to sh-t in your chair and then sit in it. These type of oppressions are formulaic and are designed to control workers and especially thinkers in the corporate malestrom. For a few decades now the money people have been winning every time all the time. The middle class is savaged. Honest workers have no morale. It is tiring being told what to do and how to do it. This is not the correct role of a professional. Do persons in the medical field have to writing these Statements? No, they do not. The USA is being savaged and robbed. Look to your foundation to invent something new, required, and depressing for you to do. Do some shopping to assuage the anxiety.
25. performance_expert - February 21, 2010 at 05:13 pm
<Comment removed by moderator>
26. ehyslopm - February 21, 2010 at 06:44 pm
Yes, most have drank the Carnegie Kool-Aid. As a professor of education I'm subjected to a plethora of slogans from both colleagues and their indoctrinated students as what quality teaching entails. If I hear "everyone learns differently" one more time in a class of 150 students - well, I might scream. Even if it was true, what possible difference would it make? Virtually all the claims on "best practice" are contradicted by other research with opposite claims. I have seen nothing that makes teaching quite as successful as having very good students.
27. esmackie - February 22, 2010 at 08:29 am
This article is spot-on. Thank you. They are a total waste of time for all concerned. I never require them as part of an application for they would all, as a previous comment noted, just go in the bin!
28. evannelsonund - February 22, 2010 at 10:05 am
To be fair, the vast majority of any type of writing is bunk, dull and predictable. Not unlike the growing columns of professors complaining about how unreasonable the simple tasks they are asked to do are.
29. opdbepko - February 22, 2010 at 01:06 pm
Let me take this in two directions: (1) Given that it is a reasonable principle to "write what you know about," how surprising is it that fresh PhDs and post-docs have nothing to write about. For the most part, their experience about classrooms is a theory. Students who integrate authentic future faculty preparation into their graduate and postdoctoral careers (not just classes, not just shadowing, not just field trips, and not indoctrination from the cognoscenti.. but actual instructional design and the chance to implement it, mentored by real faculty in their departments) have actual experiences to draw from. As a dear, retired colleague always used to remark: you cannot fake sincerity! When there is a "there" there, in terms of meaningful experiences, then the writing can reflect it. (2) It is unfortunate (but nonetheless typical) that Professor Haggerty fails to see that classroom instruction is a too-narrow definition of "teaching." Two things are true. First - you cannot NOT have a teaching philosophy... every action is predicated by an orientation - so the only thing you can be is unaware of your philosophy. And if someone watches you interact with anyone... as you attempt to work with them on anything... you will display your philosophical orientation in nearly every interaction. Second - "teaching" is not confined to the classroom. If you are a professor at a research-intensive school, then your philosophy about your life as a graduate educator is not only relevant... but, frankly, something I would like you to be thoughtful about. What do you think is being assessed during the interview, and all its components, other than how your philosophical orientation plays out in the decisions you will make. The fact that we (collectively) have not been thoughtful about the genre does not mean that the genre is the problem. BPC - Ann Arbor, 02/22/2010
30. marka - February 22, 2010 at 04:26 pm
Thoughtful article, and many thoughtful comments - this is what The Chronicle & contributors should aspire to!
However, I feel I must correct one fleeting comment - "As a dear, retired colleague always used to remark: you cannot fake sincerity!" (#29). Sure you can -- it is called acting! Not only do we have the Meryl Streeps, et al, on stage & screen, but we have many, many 'con' (confidence) men & women plying their trade daily -- ever hear of Bernie Madoff?
Sorry, but sad to say, many 'fake it 'til they make it.'
31. keystonegal - February 23, 2010 at 09:46 pm
I find the writing of a teaching statement a useful tool for me. Of course, I've read many that were ... well, fake and trite, but
Think of teaching statements as not being able to discern the OK teacher from the weak teacher ... but I suspect they are very good at identifying the exceptional teacher from the weak one.
It's kind of like syllabi ... though most can't help one discern the quality of the teaching, the ones that are one or two standard deviation from the mean really stand out and are telling.
32. dogvomit - February 26, 2010 at 09:51 am
I will go a step further than the author...both the teaching and the research statements are pointless exercises. IF you want to have a clue about the person's teaching ability, have the individual give a lecture on a pre-selected topic and then have them explain to a student some esoteric idea. This will give you a hint. I have read over hundreds of teaching statements and research statements, and they are all meaningless. Rather than a teaching statement, send me a copy of a graded excellent paper, average paper (C), and poor paper (D-F). Instead of a research statement, send me reprints of your most significant paper and your most recent paper. 90% of what you can know about a candidate should be on their CV, cover letter, and references. The rest is generally useless. And yes I am at one of those small colleges that emphasize teaching, so hold your harpoons.