The Teaching Statement out and about on the Job Market

This is Miti – one of the GTC fellows this semester. I am a 7^th year in the History Department. As the year of my studies at Yale may indicate to you, I am on the job market. This is my second time around on that particular carousel. Teaching figures heavily in my applications this year, as well as last year. All the positions on my color-coded job-spreadsheet involve teaching. As last year, the vast majority ask for a teaching statement. It seems like more applications call for a teaching statement than a sample of my research.

What, then, is a teaching statement, this vital document? Let us do what most students do: turn to the Web! 

Princeton’s Center for Teaching & Learning explains: A teaching statement is a 1-2 page single-spaced essay that explains your teaching strategies and goals and in the terms of your discipline and in the context of the teaching positions you have held and seek to hold. 

Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching makes is a bit more personal: is a purposeful and reflective essay about the author’s teaching beliefs and practices. It is an individual narrative that includes not only one’s beliefs about the teaching and learning process, but also concrete examples of the ways in which he or she enacts these beliefs in the classroom. At its best, a Teaching Statement gives a clear and unique portrait of the author as a teacher, avoiding generic or empty philosophical statements about teaching.

Great! However, what is it in practice for me, as I prepare for the job market – or the Certificate in College Teaching Preparation here at Yale? Looking back over my double-digit number of drafts (counting only the ones that I thought were final at some point), the one hard and fast thing I can say is, that the teaching statement is the single most difficult text I have ever written. After all, this is the document that will give a hiring committee an idea of me as a teacher – something the positions I have applied for, am applying for, and will apply for put a lot of emphasis on. That is a lot to put into two legible pages: explain my teaching strategies and goals, an individual narrative that avoids generic and empty platitudes, how I am in the classroom.

Yet, the teaching statement is exactly the document that gives the hiring committee the best glimpse of me as a person – as a potential colleague. It is two pages of me in a pile of hundreds of pages of hopeful and competitive applications.

Imagine it, December 2012… 

A professor is sitting in a lit office – it is dark outside. Maybe it is snowing. Final papers will be due and students are e-mailing panic-struck messages and contesting midterm grades. The editors for the professor’s newest book are asking for changes (about image reproductions rights no less!) and a committee the professor is on had a meeting that ran late. Again. The coffee ran out. Again. In addition, she or he has a pile as high as the Eiffel Tower is tall of job applications. The massive pile has been culled once based on completeness of application (not all three letters of application have come in? Discarded.); formal requirements (only one chapter of the dissertation is completed? Discarded.); cover letter (applicant’s research and teaching interests do not jive with the department’s needs? Discarded.) 

The professor reaches for the application on top, and flips to the teaching statement. She or he begins to read.

Is that my teaching statement the poor coffee-deprived faculty member is reading? Is my first sentence captivating enough to keep the professor reading to the end? Will he or she be able to imagine me in a classroom? Will I be likeable in those two pages? In addition, above all, will my teaching statement help me get the job? That is how important this document can be. It may not be, but that is how I have written mine, and considering the emphasis on teaching in so many of the History jobs announced I do not think it is unfounded. In addition, in my one, single job interview last cycle, this was the focal point of the interview. 

We are trained in academic writing. For the last six years, I have worked hard to eliminate my personality, my voice, from my writing. Yet now I am asked to expose my teaching personality, me in the classroom, to a random stranger who really just wants the Eiffel Tower pile of applications to magically disappear. 

How do I write that statement, being read in a far-away office? This is an essay: introduction, body, and conclusion. This is thesis-driven paper: the thesis is that I am a great, dedicated teacher. The teaching statement is there to provide evidence. The best way to expose Miti the teacher (I distill from workshops, reading obsessively online, and from feedback from colleagues and GTC staff) is to use concrete examples: Teaching goal – challenge in the classroom – action teacher/you took – student response. The statement is more than an expose of a teacher; it is also a writing sample. Clarity, structure, and style are important to the document. 

There is no one, tested and true, way to write a teaching statement. However, there are many great resources out there. The Internet is filled with useful resources – you can easily waste a week surfing around looking at different universities’ tips and sample collections

•  The GTC has links to a sampling of Teaching Statements.
• Columbia University: Writing a Winning TeachingStatement.
• UConn, dept. of Mathematics: teaching statement guidelines and role in the job search
• Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.
•  PrincetonUniversity’s Center for Teaching & Learning.

 Apart from the links above, I have found The Professor Is In an invaluable resource, especially her acidic post on the eightpitfalls of the teaching statement.

  

Chronicle of Higher Education of course has articles on the Teaching Statement:

• Writing Samples and Teaching Statements 
• Everything But the Teaching Statement 
• How to Write a Statement of Teaching Philosophy
• Teaching Statements are Bunk

Writing a teaching statement is very difficult. Do not expect it to be easy. But there is help out there! Do not hesitate to ask professors, friends, colleagues, and random strangers to read your Statement. The GTC is an excellent resource. My statement has seen three dramatically different “master versions”, two of which were made infinitely stronger than the previous ones, thanks to conversations with GTC staff. Am I tooting our own horn, why yes I am! Thank you for noticing.

For all of us writing our teaching statements – keep your eye on the prize: the job that will let you continue to develop as an academic researcher and teacher.

Here’s to hoping that when the caffeine deprived, tired, and over-worked search committee comes to your teaching statement, he will look up, stare off into the distance, and think “Wow! I could learn so much from this applicant as a colleague and a teacher…” and then he or she moves your application into the “Interview” pile.