NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

In teaching, it's easy to be lured into fascination with methodologies and not reflect on what this means to those broader concepts we should define for ourselves. We may say: "I will use active learning methods" or "I will teach critical thinking"—both likely to be good aspirations, but we may end up feeling that we never quite enacted our aspirations to the degree that we had hoped. Writing a teaching philosophy—and using it—is the best way to accelerate development of a major center of strength for teaching practice. Consciously getting the core tenets of our philosophy onto paper is essential to building a system and breaking with practicing through disconnected knowledge. As we reflect on our philosophy throughout our practice, we can easily see whether what we intended to do was actually what we enacted. We may discover that we became unsatisfied with a teaching experience simply because we did not do what we most wanted to do!

Every action in teaching—preparing our syllabus, preparing for a single class, or writing a test— should be consistent with our teaching philosophy. For example, let's say that we aspire in our philosophy to respect our students and to treat them as we ourselves wish to be treated by authority figures. A reader of our syllabus alone should then be able to deduce that we esteem respect as a core tenet of our teaching philosophy. On the other hand, if every irritating infraction we have experienced gets translated into the syllabus as a series of threats against future trespass, then the syllabus will read like a scold sheet, and we'll have sabotaged our own best intentions. We'd have an easier time if we gave great attention to writing our rules so as to convey that respect is the dominant basis for such rules. Another example would be to examine our stated philosophical intent to engage students in active discussions, and reflect on whether we practiced that in our last class. Perhaps we lectured the class so that no voice was heard other than our own, and our aspiration was inconsistent with our practice. Finally, suppose we set critical thinking as one of our cherished philosophical goals, but we aren't satisfied with our students in this regard. If we look at our most recent examination for our stress on critical thinking and discover that we constructed over 95% of the test around memorized facts and "plug and chug" problems, we'd likely make more resolve to better enact our intentions. Writing our teaching philosophy is not an unmerited exercise; it helps us to do what we truly want to do.

It is no accident that the teaching philosophy is the core of a teaching portfolio. Annual review files built around concepts are more clear than those based on disconnected facts. Once we have written our teaching philosophy and reflected upon it in practice, demonstrating that we successfully practiced our own teaching philosophy becomes straightforward.