ABSTRACT

This lesson presents a training model that prepares graduate tutors to support peers composing teaching philosophies, a key component of academic job materials and teaching-focused applications. The workshop introduces tutors and graduate student instructors from across campus to the purpose, audience, and common structural features of teaching philosophies, drawing on foundational scholarship that outlines genre expectations and effective reflective strategies. A second phase of individualized and staff-wide professional development reinforces tutors’ ability to offer constructive, dialogic feedback and to guide writers in articulating their teaching identities. This also draws on writing center perspectives on transfer to help tutors support writers in reframing their teaching experiences for a new rhetorical context. Graduate tutors report that the training clarifies the genre, increases their confidence, and strengthens the collaborative relationship between the teaching center and writing center, ultimately expanding institutional support for graduate writers. Materials include a reflection worksheet and a slide deck with research and tips.

CONTENTS

TRAINING DETAILS

LESSON OVERVIEW

This workshop and subsequent tutor training support are vital in creating a place on campus for graduate student writers to come for feedback beyond their committee members. Teaching philosophies are a common dossier item for traditional academic jobs (Kaplan et al. 2007; Laundon et al. 2020), and are also frequently requested for teaching awards (Laundon et al. 2020), pedagogy courses, postdocs, and other employment opportunities.

The main principles of the workshop portion are based on peer-reviewed works on the genre of teaching philosophies. For example, workshop leaders rely on publications to explain the prevalence of teaching philosophies in the hiring process (Kaplan et al. 2007), to clarify the common genre practices (Laundon et al. 2020), and to provide strategies for creating a teaching philosophy (Kearns & Sullivan 2011; Taff 2023). During the second phase, a continued tutor training, we draw upon Walsh et al. (2022), which investigates how search committees evaluate teaching, as well as Merkel (2020) in thinking about how the dialogic process of a tutoring session can assist writers in expanding their ideas of how to present their teaching experiences and techniques for unfamiliar audiences. We consider the teaching statement as one particular professional genre to be discussed in concert with other ideas in the writing center about transfer, following on Cardinal (2018), who discusses the challenge and benefits of getting writers to reimagine their past skills and utilize them in new genres.   

Graduate tutors may elect to take this optional training during any semester it is offered after their initial training. are then listed in WCOnline with the designation that they can assist with this genre after completing the workshop and review meeting with the Writing Center (WC) director. Because the initial workshop is typically offered once per semester, there are sometimes smaller cohorts of new graduate tutors who need to be trained, or no new graduate tutors on staff. Because this genre is somewhat disparate from other academic genres, we do not feel that graduate tutors (or other tutors who may work with graduate instructors composing these philosophies) would need excessive preparation beyond familiarity with the practices of their writing center before taking this workshop and completing the follow-up meeting and reflection.  

Tutors report satisfaction with and gratitude for the workshop and meeting/reflection regarding the teaching philosophies preparations. As tutors progress towards their own job market applications, they return to the training materials and are tutored by fellow grads who have been through the training process.

They also appreciate the flexibility to attend the training when it works for them and when they are potentially further along in their own academic program and are preparing to work on their own drafts. This strengthens the partnership between the teaching center and the writing center and encourages both tutors and graduate student clients to attend other teaching-related workshops. They note that the workshop paired with the reflection serves to demystify the questions and topics teaching philosophies should address and assists them in more thoughtfully approaching a teaching philosophy draft in a tutorial. In several ways, it is important that tutors are not treated differently from other graduate student participants during the workshop, as then they can authentically participate and hear how non-writing focused scholars are thinking about this challenging genre.

LEARNING OUTCOMES/OBJECTIVES

The learning outcomes for the workshop are for all participants to: 

Continuing post-workshop into the second phase (continued tutor training), further learning outcomes for tutors are to: 

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

PRE-WORK

Facilitator Pre-work     

The staff member leading the workshop should complete the following pre-work: 

• Review the provided PowerPoint and make any preferred updates and additions to make it institution and writing center specific, where relevant. We have provided comments in the PowerPoint’s “notes” sections to highlight where facilitators will likely want to make changes or specify things for their particular institutional context. 
• Find and prepare example teaching statements to share, either printing hardcopies for an in-person workshop or creating an accessible digital folder if it is being held online. We encourage facilitators to seek out examples from newly hired faculty at their institution, as clearly their statements have been well-received within a current context. If you hold the workshop in person, print off copies of at least two different statements to analyze, optimally from fairly disparate disciplines. If holding the workshop online, put the anonymized or public documents in an accessible folder. 
• Prepare the provided reflection worksheet we designed based on questions borrowed or adapted from The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If you hold the workshop in person, print off copies. If holding the workshop online, put the document in an accessible folder and show participants how to download or make their own copy, as this is a worksheet for individual reflection/work, not a collaborative document. Be sure to keep it as a Word Document rather than a PDF so online participants can type within the available space once they have downloaded or made their online copy. 
• For the second phase (continued tutor training), in partnership with the writing center (WC) director (if the workshop is co-facilitated with a campus partner), set up dedicated times/available scheduling after the workshop for the director or lead staff person to meet with the tutors who completed the workshop training to answer questions, receive feedback, and provide requested additional resources when possible, after completing an individual reflection. Depending upon the size of your writing center and the schedules of the tutors who have been trained, this may be a collective session or a series of one-to-one sessions. 

While writing center folks can easily run both elements of this lesson themselves, we strongly encourage collaborations with your institution's teaching center or graduate career office where possible to not only bring in additional voices, but to introduce tutors to another campus resource. We account for the time that may need to be spent reaching out to these campus partners in the preparation time estimate.

Participant Pre-work

We do not require participants (either graduate tutors or other graduate student attendees) to do any pre-work. Participants may choose to bring a draft with them to the workshop, but this is not required, and the workshop facilitator should encourage participants to visit the writing center for feedback on drafts. We can imagine this workshop being a session in a series of collaborative workshops between the writing center and the teaching center or career center for common job material documents (cover letters, CVs, research statements, etc.).

INTRODUCTION (5 MINUTES)

This training occurs in two parts: 1) an informational workshop in which tutors learn about the genre of teaching philosophies and analyze examples as a group, and 2) continued professional development through tutor staff meetings in partnership with an individual meeting with the writing center director or other lead staff. The first part (the workshop) is offered to both tutors and non-tutor graduate students interested in writing a statement; the second part (professional development meetings and meetings with the WC director) is only attended by tutors. 

This lesson guides graduate students and graduate tutors through the process of understanding, analyzing, and composing teaching philosophy statements. The session will help participants situate the teaching philosophy as a document used across multiple academic disciplines and in most job applications for faculty positions and other teaching-focused roles. Facilitators should emphasize two recurring challenges that emerge in consultations: writers’ tendency to remain abstract or theoretical and their inclination to focus primarily on instructor actions rather than student learning. Naming these patterns early allows the workshop facilitator to return to them throughout the workshop and reinforce best practices.

During the workshop conversations and the follow-up meetings with the WC director or lead staff, facilitators should listen for observations related to structure, specificity, and student-centered language, and help bring shared takeaways to the surface. This helps promote a stronger understanding of common organizational approaches, including narrative openings, metaphors, critical teaching moments, or traditional academic structures, and clarifying what each approach can accomplish rhetorically. The workshop session concludes with guided freewriting and reflection, allowing immediate application of workshop concepts and creating space for participants to articulate how they will carry this knowledge into future tutoring sessions and teaching contexts. Facilitators will need to consider what, if anything, they’d like graduate students and graduate tutors to do with these reflections, beyond self-use. 

Facilitators should view this workshop not only as skills training, but as part of a broader effort to frame the writing center as a space on campus for professional, pedagogical, and intellectual development. Depending upon your institutional audience, we suggest explicitly stating this to participants towards the beginning of the workshop session. 

In the workshop, the audience is expected to be a mix of graduate students who are preparing to write teaching philosophies and graduate tutors (many of whom may also be instructors themselves) who plan to give feedback on these statements.

The presenters start with five minutes of introductions and explain the goals of the workshops (slides 1 – 2).

BODY OF LESSON (80 MINUTES)

Workshop, Phase 1

Introduce the genre conventions (10 minutes)

Facilitators will spend ten minutes clarifying the role and purpose of the teaching philosophy genre, as well as the audience of who usually reads these statements (slides 3 - 7). It is valuable to highlight that teaching statements should include specific instances and anecdotes describing their teaching, as many first-time writers can focus solely on philosophical or theoretical descriptions. We also find it important to remind writers that they should focus on student learning, as many write predominately about their actions as an instructor, foregoing the student-centered focus (slide 5). 

Analyze a strong sample (25 minutes)

At this time, we explain that many people understand the genre better after they have analyzed an example. We pass out one anonymized example statement, giving five minutes to read independently and write down some initial thoughts to the guiding questions. Strong statement examples incorporate narratives about pedagogical strengths with clear anecdotes about how these choices impacted student learning. 

Facilitators will want, if possible, to share example statements that address various types of teaching scenarios – for instance, a statement from an instructor who has primarily served as a GTA/course assistant/discussion section leader and another from an instructor who has served as instructor of record/designed their own course. 

We provide ten minutes for participants to talk in small groups about their responses, and then all workshop participants share out for ten minutes, with the facilitator directing towards main points (common formats, detail-rich examples, etc.) (slide 8). We aim to leave this first analyzing activity open to allow participants to become familiar with the genre and to see what sticks out to them in reading. Many participants will reference back to the content we have already discussed (such as what hiring committees want to know or infer). Occasionally, a participant will bring up a point or inference not covered on the slides, and as facilitators, we welcome that and share that just as they will differ in how they read these statements, so will hiring committees, so we encourage having multiple readers and/or tutor appointments. 

Identify organizational choices (15 minutes)

Using the example as a guiding point, facilitators spend five minutes explaining common organizational choices for teaching statements (slide 9).  

In our consultations, we most commonly see four distinct organizational choices: 

1. The AP English essay model (five-paragraph essay format with a clear introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion), 
2. A story (writers start with a narrative related to teaching or learning and explain how the moment impacts their classroom practices),
3. A metaphor (writers choose a metaphor to relate their classroom practices back to), or 
4. Critical moments (the author describes key moments in their classes, such as the first day of instruction, big tests, or critical labs). 

We then spend five minutes highlighting common organizational choices within each body paragraph and ideally what the writers convey with their specific teaching examples (slides 10) and five minutes emphasizing how writers can reflect on teaching goals in the conclusion (slide 11). 

Analyze another strong example (25 minutes)

Now that participants have a better understanding of format expectations and norms, we distribute and analyze another example. 

We spend five minutes reading and then ten minutes talking as a group through what feedback we would have for the writer (asking questions such as, what do you think this writer is doing well? What questions of clarification would you have for the writer?) (slide 12). 

Presenters talk through common pitfalls for five minutes (slide 13). 

Then, we distribute a worksheet that provides a guided format for drafting a teaching statement. We ask students to free-write for five minutes, then turn to a partner and talk about how the process of free-writing went (slides 14 - 15). There may be more or less time for free-writing and partner sharing depending on how talkative participants were during the statement analysis portions and/or if they had many questions throughout the presentation. 

Wrap up (5 minutes)

We then end the workshop portion with five minutes of questions (slide 16), offering to stay later if people have more questions than our set time allows. We also share next steps for participants who are prepared to start writing or for those who want to learn more (slide 17). 

If the training is exclusively for graduate tutors, we suggest adding one additional slide informing them about their next steps, which include meeting(s) with the WC director and completing a written reflection.

Conclusion of Workshop/Phase 1

For participants who express a desire to learn more, we share further resources in a follow-up email after the workshop. We highlight that they can get feedback on their drafts or thinking process by meeting with a writing center tutor. We also attach a few more examples in case people need more inspiration on getting started. We also encourage tutors to visit the campus career center or their college’s/unit’s center, if applicable, for further audience review of their drafts, strengthening those ties. Lastly, we include our citations list for folks who want to read more on how teaching statements are commonly thought about and/or evaluated. 

Continued Tutor Training/Continued Professional Development/Phase 2

After tutors complete the workshop, they schedule a meeting with the writing center director to discuss what they’ve learned (this meeting is sometimes with multiple tutors if several have attended the same workshop). They also submit a short reflection utilizing Ash and Clayton’s (2009) DEAL model (described in our Assessing for Understanding section) to document the content they gained by attending and participating in the workshop, as well as ways they will plan to use the information in their future tutoring sessions and their own teaching philosophy composition (if relevant). We invite them to expand upon the questioning that is required in the workshop to consider how they would approach giving feedback to a graduate student client in a tutoring session. 

During our next graduate tutor professional development meeting, the tutors who attended the workshop share their experiences and questions with the other tutors and share their subsequent experiences working with any clients they have seen working on these documents (more frequently seen in the fall, but sometimes in early spring). Throughout this process, graduate tutors are encouraged to continue to brainstorm ways that they can support and cultivate students’ development as writers and, in this case, as teachers and future faculty.  

The follow-up meeting for tutors with the WC director and further review of examples in later professional development meetings serve to support and reinforce these principles and invite tutors to share their own ideas and examples, as they work with graduate instructors in tutorial sessions and even begin composing their own teaching philosophies.

ASSESSING FOR UNDERSTANDING

Graduate tutors, in their one-on-one or small group meeting with the writing center director, share their reflections and ask further questions about the genre as needed. Reflections are based on the DEAL model (Ash & Clayton 2009) frequently utilized in service-learning contexts. The DEAL model structures reflection as a three-step process for learners: 

1.      Describe their experience objectively and in detail; 

2.      Examine the experience in relation to specific learning goals or objectives; and 

3.      Articulate Learning by identifying what they learned, how they learned it, why it matters, and how they will apply it in the future. 

This approach emphasizes moving beyond simple description toward deeper meaning-making and actionable insights that improve future thinking and practice, very much in alignment with what WCs aim to do in working with writers in a tutorial session. 

The WC director maintains, when possible, a repository of example statements from prior appointments that can be used as training materials, and sorts through the WC Online (or other scheduling/reporting software) data to see appointments that are coded with this genre. Keeping this repository not only assists in future trainings, but also allows for the WC to keep annotated copies to see where tutors have applied the guidance from the training workshop.  

Tutors, after completing their meeting with the director, are then listed in the WC Online dropdown specializations menu as available to work with grads on teaching statements. The director may also choose to sit in and observe teaching statement sessions with newly trained tutors to follow up on what tutors share in their DEAL reflections, possibly providing further support and answering questions. 

Each semester and academic year, the director reviews client feedback on all sessions, including those focused on teaching statements (however, as many centers may find, because our post-session survey is optional, we receive feedback from a relatively low percentage of total appointments). The director takes this feedback into account when planning future training and deciding if tutors should continue to be listed with this consultation type as an option.

Adapting the Workshop Format for Other Genres

A similar lesson plan could be done to assist graduate tutors in learning about other teaching-related professional documents, such as research statements, academic job cover letters, mission alignment statements, etc. Again, we encourage collaborations with your institution’s teaching center, graduate career office, or other partner program that you’d like tutors to be more familiar with.

Adapting the Workshop Modality

We frequently offer the workshop portion as a webinar, in case there are participants who cannot easily get to our physical campus. As a webinar, the workshop portion follows the same outline. For the analysis portion, facilitators will need to link to a folder with accessible teaching philosophy examples, then put participants in breakout rooms for small group discussions. During the large group share out, we encourage each person to share a strong analysis they heard from their partners in the webinar’s chat. This enables all participants to easily share their thoughts and to quickly get access to multiple points of view. 

Another option for the webinar portion of analyzing statements is to have participants leave comments on a shared online document. This option allows participants to jump-start the “share” portion before entering breakout rooms, as they can see one another’s thoughts and respond to them in the shared document. 

Adding a Training Follow-Up/Refresher

Teaching statements are discussed in graduate tutor professional development meetings, held a few times per academic year. We can imagine that a follow-up meeting once per semester or year, depending upon the institution’s population and needs, could be run by the WC to refresh the already trained tutors who would be assisting writers in this genre and hear about tutorial sessions in which current tutors have encountered good examples and challenging questions.

Designing a Training for Undergraduate Tutors

While our center holds all-staff meetings where both undergraduate and graduate tutors have professional development simultaneously, we do not have undergraduate tutors work with graduate clients, so we do not explicitly address teaching statements in these all-staff meetings. If a WC wished to adapt this lesson for a broader scope of tutors (undergraduate and/or professional), we suggest additional framing, potentially including a visit from a graduate student instructor or early-career faculty member, and more time for examples. This would serve as important background/initial learning as these folks, depending upon their context, may not have had the experience of classroom teaching, and may find it more difficult to understand the genre and the effectiveness of anecdotes. Alternatively, undergraduate tutors can serve as a useful audience because they can comment upon the student learning aspect of the teaching philosophy most directly.

RESOURCES & REFERENCES

RefeRENCES

Ash, S. L., & Clayton, P. H. (2009).Generating, deepening, and documenting learning: The power of critical reflection in applied learning. Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, 1, 25–48.https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1188550.pdf 

Cardinal, J. (2018). Transfer two ways: Options and obstacles in staff education for transfer. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 43(1-2), 2-9. https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/wln/v43n1/cardinal.pdf

Center for Research on Learning & Teaching, University of Michigan. (n.d.) Teaching philosophies from U-M.
https://crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tstpum#toprail 

Kaplan, M., Meizlish, D. S., O’Neal, C., & Wright, M. C. (2007). A research-based rubric for developing statements of teaching philosophy. To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, 26(1), 242-262. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2334-4822.2008.tb00512.x

Kearns, K. D., & Sullivan, C. S. (2011). Resources and practices to help graduate students and postdoctoral fellows write statements of teaching philosophy. Advances in Physiology Education 35(2), 136-145. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00123.2010 

Laundon, M., Cathcart, A., & Greer, D. A. (2020). Teaching philosophy statements. Journal of Management Education,44(5), 557-587. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562920942289 

Merkel, W. (2020). “What I Mean Is…”: The role of dialogic interactions in developing a statement of teaching philosophy. Journal of Second Language Writing, 48, Article 100702. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2019.100702

Taff, S. D. (2023). A framework for using teaching philosophy statements to guide reflective and inclusive instruction. Journal of Occupational Therapy Education, 7(3). https://doi.org/10.26681/jote.2023.070308 

Walsh, K. P., Pottmeyer, L. O., Meizlish, D., & Hershock, C. (2022). How search committees assess teaching: Lessons for CTLs. To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, 41(2), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.583

The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (n.d.) Teaching statements. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/teaching-statements/ 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Participants may find value in watching this video on teaching philosophies from the Claremont Graduate University:

The Center for Academic & Faculty Excellence (CAFE). (2024, May 15). Writing Your Teaching Philosophy Statement [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/OGlQACSE2S0?si=MmBg06xvpYKop2cn

Participants may also find value in the following additional readings: 

Lawrence, S., & Zawacki, T. M. (2018). Re/Writing the Center: Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center. Utah State University Press.

Schönwetter, D. J., Sokal, L., Friesen, M., & Taylor, L. (2013). Teaching philosophies reconsidered: A conceptual model for the development and evaluation of teaching philosophy statements. International Journal for Academic Development, 7(1), 83-97. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13601440210156501 

Yeom, Y., Miller, M. A., & Delp, R. (2018). Constructing a teaching philosophy: Aligning beliefs, theories, and practice. Teaching and Learning in Nursing, 13, 131-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teln.2018.01.004

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Mary Helen Truglia

Indiana University Bloomington

mtruglia@iu.edu 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-4894-192X

Mary Helen Truglia (she/her) is the director of Writing Tutorial Services and an instructional consultant focused on writing within the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana University Bloomington. She oversees and mentors over fifty undergraduate and graduate writing tutors as they assist students at all levels with writing and run graduate writing groups. She also consults with instructors about writing pedagogy and runs writing and teaching-related workshops for students and faculty. In addition to her writing center work, she teaches as affiliate faculty in English and in the Hutton Honors College. She holds a PhD in English from Indiana University. Her research interests include genre studies, composition studies beyond the classroom, connections between writing centers and intensive writing classes, and relational pedagogies within the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning.

Leslie E. Drane

Indiana University Bloomington

lesdrane@iu.edu

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3833-6743

Leslie E. Drane (she/her) is a lead instructional consultant at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana University Bloomington. She collaborates with instructors at all stages of their careers to support them in achieving their teaching goals. Leslie holds a PhD in anthropology from Indiana University Bloomington, where her research centered on the concepts of place and landscape as components of community, utilizing both archaeological and ethnographic methodologies. During her time as a college instructor, she designed and taught a variety of unique courses, such as “Global Perspectives of Death” and “Anthropology of Disney,” in addition to teaching International Studies. Her current research interests focus on program evaluation, the pedagogical development of graduate students and postdocs, and promoting inclusive active learning teaching practices.  

Truglia & Drane, Center Moves, no. 6 (Special Issue), September 2026.