Developing a Philosophy of Teaching
It seems safe to say that every teacher has a philosophy guiding
his or her teaching, but that's not to say that every teacher has an
enunciated philosophy of teaching. Enunciating a philosophy to
guide your teaching has at least two kinds of advantages:
- Reflection. Most of us have found that forcing
ourselves to write a clear explanation of something demonstrates
to us that our understanding of that thing was less complete than
we thought. So it is with our philosophy of teaching. Until we sit
down to make it explicit, we are likely to avoid dealing with hard
issues, and particularly with inconsistencies between our
practices and our beliefs. The act of writing about our philosophy
forces us to confront these hard issues. And there is good reason
to believe that that makes us better teachers.
- Communication. Making your philosophy explicit means
that you can share it with those who care about your teaching.
These "stakeholders" include students, colleagues, teaching
improvement consultants, and administrators.
- Students may be able to make a decision to take or not take
a course from you based on your philosophy, but more
importantly they may be able to maximize the benefit they
derive from your teaching efforts if they know why you are
doing what you are doing.
- Colleagues may be in a better position to collaborate with
you, and departments may be in a better position to provide
students with a coherent curriculum if teaching philosophy is
an open topic of discussion.
- If you seek help in improving your teaching, the person you
seek help from will need to know something about the philosophy
that guides your teaching in order to help you. The consultant
will either figure this out (in a hazy way) from talking with
you, or learn it from your explicitly stated philosophy. The
second is probably better.
- A statement of teaching philosophy is increasingly becoming
part of the evidence weighed by administrators making hiring,
promotion, salary and other personnel decisions.
