Overview

The Teaching Statement is a document whose purpose is to communicate your approach to teaching students the important disciplinary knowledge, skills, and attitudes of your field of study.  This document is an opportunity for you to make a case for yourself as an effective teacher by describing how your approach to teaching helps students achieve major disciplinary learning goals.  The statement should be highly personal, reflecting what you most value about your discipline and how you convey those values to your students.  The most meaningful statements also honestly address how you continue to work towards improving your teaching effectiveness.

Audience

The teaching statement is one way to make teaching public.  Often, teaching statements are written for inclusion in materials submitted for job applications, award packets, or performance reviews.  Because these committees can be interdisciplinary and pressed for time, it is appropriate to keep these documents brief and jargon free so that they can be meaningful to a diverse audience.  However, teaching statements are also opportunities for reflection for your own professional development and improvement with experience over time.  The teaching statement becomes a living document that you come back to update regularly as your approach and methods change and as you learn more about what approaches are effective for student learning.

Content

Three elements make up the major components of a teaching statement:

1. Learning Goals

2. Teaching Methods

3. Assessment of Teaching and Learning

Use the links at the right to access videos that address each of these three components of the teaching statement.  Please feel free to pause the video or adjust the video speed (if allowed by your video viewer) while the example texts are scrolling in order to read at a pace that feels most comfortable to you.