Teaching Philosophies

The statement of teaching philosophy serves a crucial function in your professional development. If you plan on a career in teaching, you should begin drafting one midway through your first semester. It will evolve as you continue to explore composition pedagogy and apply ideas from scholarship to your teaching. Ultimately, you'll use this document when applying for positions, promotions, awards, and other opportunities.

Many teachers continue to revisit and revise their teaching philosophies throughout their careers. The process of articulating our values and practices helps us to refine our materials and approaches in order to better serve an ever-changing student population. It's not unusual for veteran teachers to track significant changes in their philosophies over time, in response to shifts in demographics, technologies, and trial & error.


A standard teaching philosophy in rhetoric and composition runs for about 2-3 pages single-spaced (1000 words). Despite its name, this document should focus on your teaching practices and the reasons behind them. In other words, you're explaining what you want students to learn from your course, and how you help them develop their writing abilities through different assignments and classroom activities.

Drafting your first teaching statement can seem like an overwhelming task, especially for first-year teachers. However, the process is challenging for anyone.

You can begin brainstorming in a number of ways. First, you should probably read or re-read two important documents: The WPA Outcomes Statement and the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.

Together, these two documents articulate key concepts that any college writing course should impart to students. They also provide you with the vocabulary to begin explaining what matters most to you as a writing teacher. For example, Framework for Success identifies seven habits of mind:

• Curiosity
• Openness
• Engagement
• Creativity
• Persistence
• Responsibility
• Flexibility
• Metacognition

The WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0 identities essential characteristics of writing pedagogy:

• Rhetorical Knowledge
• Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing
• Writing & Composing Processes
• Knowledge of Conventions

First-time teachers may want to focus on some of these traits. As you become immersed in composition theory and pedagogy, you'll encounter more specialized terms such as transfer, genre uptake, code-meshing, translingualism, and many others. But a successful statement of teaching philosophy can simply focus on the basics.

Your statement should begin with 1-2 paragraphs that introduce a central concept like metacognition. Briefly define your term in relation to your teaching, and why it matters most to you and your students. For example, how does cultivating metacognition in college writers prepare them for success in their coursework and their later on?

Next, you need to begin explaining specific classroom activities and readings to illustrate how you adapt this concept your teaching. This section serves as the main body of your statement. Here, you'll provide at least two substantial paragraphs describing lesson plans, readings, and student responses to the material. You should provide some detailed accounts of 2-3 lesson plans. Think about this section as if you're explaining some material to another teacher who might try to adapt it to their own classroom.

Once you've described some classroom activities, proceed to a discussion of 1-2 major assignments that derive from the in-class work and lesson plans. Outline your expectations to students, including your grading criteria. You want to make it clear how completing these major assignments reinforces students' acquisition of habits of mind or aspects of writing. It's also a good idea to add a sentence or two explaining the time frame for completion for these projects, what kind of feedback you tend to give, and other scaffolding that helps them complete their work. Finally, you can identify any recurring struggles or challenges that students have, what advice you impart to them, and a sense of what students think about their own work or evolution as writers that occurs over the course of the semester.

Your final paragraphs should summarize and reiterate the importance of the key terms you introduced and explored. Here, you might also mention any portfolios they ultimately submit and how that helps to cement their learning. You can end your statement by outlining any plans you have to continue improving these assignments for future semesters.

Consider this outline for your teaching statement:

• Introduction that introduces 1-2 key over-aching concepts from the WPA Outcomes Statement, or Framework for Success.
• Body paragraphs that discuss in-class work, activities, and lesson plans that model these concepts for students.
• Body paragraphs that describe 1-2 major assignments that develop and reinforce your key concepts.
• Body paragraphs that focus on how students develop as writers, what challenges they encounter, and how you help them complete these projects.
• Closing paragraphs that outline your future plans regarding these lesson plans and assignments, and a re-emphasis on why they matter to you and the students.

Despite their value, the teaching philosophy remains one of the most challenging and frustrating to write in any educational field. On the one hand, we feel compelled to describe our teaching in ways that emphasis its original, fresh, or innovative qualities. And yet search committees also read statements of teaching philosophy in order to gain a sense of an applicant's familiarity with their discipline's best practices. As such, they expect a degree of uniformity and common knowledge.

These goals may seem in conflict with one another, but you can learn to balance them with practice. For example, consider how a successful teaching philosophy would discuss the writing process. True, a teacher applying to a composition program should include some discussion of drafting, peer review, and feedback. However, the writing process has become standard practice in our discipline. So discussing it explicitly in the foreground doesn't make much sense. A teaching philosophy that only discussed a teacher's approach to the writing process could seem limited, incomplete, and convey a sense of inexperience. It's best to make passing references to these practices and embed them elsewhere. 

The teaching philosophy is a demanding genre, and in some ways restrictive. Search committees want to see some degree of innovation in your teaching, but they also want applicants to demonstrate their knowledge of best practices. You should exercise some caution if you plan to introduce any concepts or practices from other disciplines. Make sure you stress how such ideas will help students become better writers and communicators.

Try your best to keep the focus on writing and communication. Many teaching philosophies can veer off topic by discussing aspects of education in general, or become mired in details of classroom management. You don't need to devote much or any attention to issues such such as attendance, participation, or disciplinary problems. Focus on your values and practices as a teacher, and how they align with the discipline. 

You may ultimately develop several teaching philosophies over the course of your job searches and broader career. Keep them on file for reference. Many teachers keep one or two "generic" teaching philosophies, and then write specific ones adapted to the principles and practices of the programs where they wish to work. When you begin searching for jobs, you should always visit a department or program's website and try to learn as much about their practices as possible. You want to describe your teaching honestly, but you also want to convince search committees that your practices align well with theirs. In other words, your teaching philosophy explains how you're a good fit.

Many teachers will share their philosophies if you ask. You can keep a folder on your computer with several examples. Read them several times. There's no shame in borrowing ideas from others and adapting them to your own teaching. Likewise, you can imitate the tone and structure of other statements as you work on crafting your own voice. All of us began our own teaching philosophies by reading and studying those from our mentors.