Tips for writing your teaching statement
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
Continuing a series of recent blog posts that focus on applying for academic jobs, this week is all about writing your teaching statement. If you’re applying for a teaching-stream position or a position that heavily emphasizes teaching, then you already know how important this statement is. If you’re applying for a position that places more emphasis on research, then it might feel easy to be dismissive of the teaching statement, cobbling something together at the last minute. After all, research is priority, right? No; this kind of thinking could cost you an interview. The teaching statement not only describes what kind of instructor you would be in a formal classroom, but it also gives the search committee insight into how you would mentor students in your lab, and how you might collaborate with, and mentor, students in their labs. Are you going to be someone they would want to send their students to?
Here are a few things you should consider and address in your teaching statement:
Have a philosophy. Teaching statements often begin with a description of the philosophy that you use to guide your teaching style and activities. Don’t bullshit this part. Do some reflection and some research to ensure that you can describe your teaching philosophy in terms of guiding principles and methodologies that are grounded in pedagogical evidence and your personal experience.
Give evidence of your teaching experience and proof of effectiveness. Describe the courses you have taught, including the format (e.g., lecture, lab, team-taught) and the type and size of the audience for those courses (e.g., 100+ first-year undergraduate students). Demonstrate your teaching effectiveness through tangible outcomes. This could be in the form of course evaluations, including rankings against the departmental average. This could include quotes from students who provided feedback. Or this could be demonstrations of learning (e.g., success in programming and analysing EEG data with no prior experience).
Describe how you monitor and implement feedback. Do you solicit student feedback throughout your course? If so, what have you done with that feedback? If you noticed that many students failed your first exam, how did you adjust your teaching going forward to support learning? Teaching doesn’t go right all the time; the important part is to show how you have learned and adjusted accordingly.
And, here’s a final tip for the teaching statement:
Teaching examples can go beyond formal courses. You probably teach all of the time and don’t even realize it. Maybe it was a 1-hour workshop you gave to a group of students, or a community lecture you gave at the library. Or maybe it was the journal club you organized. Or the day-to-day mentoring in the lab of the undergraduate and graduate students to help them get their research off the ground. All of these count as teaching experiences that have helped you develop your philosophy and methods, and have given you opportunity to solicit feedback.
The teaching statement can often be the difference between a well-rounded and thoughtful job application that gets further consideration and one that gets left in the pile. If you need support in developing your job applications, including the teaching statement, click here for more details and to apply to my coaching program, or book a call with me here.
Next week: The academic job talk
