Teaching Philosophies: Examples from PENN

from the Office of the Provost and the SAS Center for Teaching and Learning
at the University of Pennsylvania

Hiring committees are increasingly asking for candidates to submit statements of their teaching philosophies. But since these are highly personal statements, it is hard to provide guidelines for how to write them. Below are some examples.

In 2000 and 2001, President Judith Rodin sponsored a prize for excellence in teaching by graduate students. The winners were asked to submit a description of their teaching philosophy; the examples given below were submitted by the winners. In some cases, there are also links below to the authors' educational websites. Most of the teaching philosophies below come from this source.

Awardees 2000-2001

Aaron Bloomfield
Christopher Burrows
Jeff Casello
Gregory Flaxman
Tamar Kaplan
Eric Kondratieff website
R. Jason Parsley website
Stacey Philbrick
Carl Seaquist website
Ed Weinstein
Gordon Wong
Feng Gai