Writing a Teaching Philosophy

Overview & Purpose

A teaching philosophy statement is a written description of your values, goals, and approaches regarding teaching and learning.

It often uses a combination of evidence and personal narrative from your teaching journey to make the case that you have excelled as an educator. As a general expression of your beliefs and practices, your teaching philosophy can be used as a reference point for adaptation across contexts, including

• Applying for academic positions
• Submitting materials for promotion (e.g., tenure, continuing status)
• Applying for grants and awards
• Shaping your course outline contents or language
• Introducing yourself and your course website
• Reflecting on your teaching approaches, practices, and growth

A statement of your teaching philosophy is often a required or highly recommended part of a teaching dossier, so many instructors only develop teaching philosophy statements during application processes. However, this is not the only time a teaching philosophy statement is useful. Throughout your career, you may find it helpful to go through the process of reflecting about your own teaching, which gives you a better idea of your beliefs and strengths as an instructor and the ways in which you could develop your teaching practices over time.  For instance, if you are a proponent of team-based learning, you could seek out new approaches to group learning that would make it an even more effective learning experience for your students.

Developing a Teaching Philosophy Throughout Your Career

While you could begin reflecting on and drafting your teaching philosophy in graduate school, you can also begin this curation and reflection process at any time. Overall, the sooner you start thinking about and drafting your teaching philosophy, the easier it is to develop a philosophy when you need it. Once you have articulated your values and practices as an instructor, it is far easier to jot down relevant examples of your teaching strategies and successes as you go. We recommend avoiding last-minute writing as much as possible.

Some questions that might support you as you think about your teaching and prepare to draft a teaching philosophy include the following:

• How do you enact your teaching beliefs in your courses?
• How has your thinking about your teaching practices evolved over time?
• What have you done to change or enhance your teaching practices?
• What are some new innovations you have incorporated into your teaching?
• What has been the impact of your teaching and learning approaches on your students, yourself, your colleagues, and/or the institution?

With your responses to these kinds of reflective questions to guide you, it will be much easier to pull together or revise your teaching philosophy statement and include examples to illustrate how you translate your teaching philosophy into effective classroom practices that facilitate student learning.

Organization & Content

While there are a number of common sections and expectations relating to the structure and content of a teaching dossier, teaching philosophy statements should also be unique to each educator and could reflect contextual factors such as your disciplinary contexts, mentors who have shaped your teaching, lived experiences, types of teaching (e.g., graduate vs. undergraduate, large vs. small classes), and program-related teaching requirements (e.g. case-based learning). The following sections identify some strategies you could use as you organize your material and develop your content.

Organization Strategies 

There are two common ways that educators structure their teaching philosophy statement:  

1. By teaching values (e.g., flexibility, curiosity) and/or by teaching approaches and frameworks (e.g., community-based learning, accessible teaching practices).  

Using this approach, your approach to developing your philosophy will include the following three primary sections:

2. By moving from your beliefs to your practices, to the impact on learners, to your future goals.

Fig. 1. Example structure for a teaching philosophy statement. Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, University of Calgary. Licensed under a Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Ultimately, there are no firm rules on the structure, and many educators will explore a variety of organizational approaches when developing their philosophy statement. Whichever structure you choose, your objective as a writer is to help your readers understand what matters to you in teaching, why it matters, how you teach, and how your approaches have impacted learners. 

Content Development 

The reflective questions in this section have been adapted from the Teaching Philosophy Statements handout from the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Queen’s University, which is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC). 

Teaching Beliefs and Orientations 

To identify the values, strategies, frameworks, and approaches that you might build into your teaching philosophy statement, consider the following reflection questions (adapted from Queen’s University):  

• What beliefs do you hold about learners in your disciplinary context? 

• How do students learn best? What helps them to engage proactively and accessibly in their learning? 

• What is your role in facilitating student learning? 

• What are your teaching goals? 

• What instructional and assessment approaches do you most use in your teaching? Why these approaches in particular? 

• What have you learned from or about your teaching over time? 

• What are your strengths and areas for improvement as an educator? 

Teaching Experiences 

For each of the values and approaches that you choose to include in the teaching philosophy statement, it may be helpful for you to begin thinking of specific experiences you have that illustrate the kinds of practices that inform your teaching: 

 
For the experiences and examples identified above, you could consider the following reflective questions (adapted from Queen’s University): 

• What engaged or inspired you to adopt these practices? 

• What was helpful or affirming about these experiences (for yourself and your students)? 

• What surprised you the most about the experiences you are describing? 

• How did your approach support engaging and accessible teaching and learning? 

• What were the outcomes of your approaches for the learners in your classroom?

Additional Resources 

Center for Research on Teaching and Learning. (2007). Writing a Statement of Teaching Philosophy for the Academic Job Search. University of Michigan. 

Centre for Teaching and Learning. Teaching Dossier. Queen’s University. 

Ruge, G. (2020). Teaching philosophies revalued: Beyond personal development to academic and institutional capacity building. International Journal for Academic Development 28(1). 

Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. Teaching Dossiers. Resource Library. University of Calgary.