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Teaching Statements

It's a shame that search committees customarily ask candidates for "statements of teaching philosophy," a name which makes it sound as though the committee is looking for a lofty, abstract manifesto about the purpose of higher education. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The best teaching statements are, almost without exception, those which drill down and give a potential employer a vivid portrait of the candidate's presence and personality as an instructor. Insofar as they are "philosophical" at all, good teaching statements take care to explain a teacher's priorities. What must your students learn—and how, exactly, do you teach it?

Harvard Griffin GSAS students: Schedule a consultation on your teaching statement
Harvard FAS Faculty: Schedule a consultation on your teaching statement

How to Compose a Teaching Statement

In our Bok Seminar on Teaching and the Job Market, we encourage graduate students to think about the teaching statement as a hybrid of three things:

  1. A story.The most effective statements tell a story about the evolution of their authors’ teaching commitments and practices in dialogue with feedback from their students. Like any good story, it should be organized around some "tension," feature a "protagonist," be driven by a "plot," etc. These might come from: (1) your own experience as a student and/or teacher; (2) the research on teaching and learning (i.e. evidence-based pedagogy); (3) an interesting student profile in your courses; and/or (4) your scholarship.
  2. A performance of disciplinary mastery.Almost every discipline has some mental model of how knowledge is structured—and, therefore, of how one moves from being less expert to more expert. Which parts of that mental model are satisfactory, or even sacred? Which parts are unsatisfactory, or ripe for creative disruption? (Is there some foundational concept that could be taught more effectively? Have you tried letting sophomores do something that is usually reserved for seniors?) How can you bring the skills which you ordinarily apply to your research to your teaching to demonstrate that you have a bird’s-eye view of your field?
  3. A window onto your understanding of students. A reader of your teaching statement should be able to walk away from the text with a memorable anecdote or otherwise strong sense of how well you understand the students whom you teach—including how their identities and experiences inflect their experience of your teaching. How does your classroom actually look on a given day? Are your activities learner-centered? What sort of voice do you use when speaking with students?

In order to help graduate students think about how they might apply these lenses practically to their own statements, we suggest three exercises that you could apply on your own:

  1. Kurt Vonnegut's Shapes of Stories.Kurt Vonnegut worked out what he claimed were the eight essential "shapes" or storyformsof world (well, perhaps Western) narratives. (Here's his lecture on the topic.) We'll pair up students, have them pick a story shape, and ask them in three or five minutes to use that shape to narrate a teaching experience. One of the best things about this quick exercise is that it invariably requires you to identify an obstacle or moment of failure in your teaching, and to explain how you have grown and learned from the experience—a useful remedy to the temptation to describe yourself, implausibly, as a perfect teacher.
  2. Close read a curriculum. Harvard has a wonderful resource buried in its undergraduate handbook—a book of its own called the "Fields of Concentration." In it, each department attempts to explain what its faculty teaches, and why an undergraduate should want to learn it. It also lays out in detail the requirements which each department sets for its concentrators (the Harvard term for majors). We ask graduate students to close-read their department's entry, and to compare it to one or more curricula from similar departments at other institutions. What can we learn about how our fields—perhaps only implicitly—think a student advances from novice to expert? Is there agreement about what kinds of things every [historian/biologist/linguist] ought to learn, and in what order? This can be a terrific way to start thinking about what you prioritize in your own teaching.
  3. What are the examples doing?Depending on the field, we will collate a few sample teaching statements and give them a very quick read, focusing on the moments in which the writer speaks concretely about an instance of his/her teaching. By focusing on these moments—asking whether they illustrate something about the teacher or the students, and especially about whether they are meant to communicate something about the teacher's approach, or merely that he or she has experience—job market candidates become more aware of the value of deploying examples of their own teaching economically and purposefully.