Why I did it. Secondly the faculty member states his or her philosophy and goals for teaching. The focus of this “Why I did it.” section faces questions like:

• Given my responsibilities, what goals did I attempt to reach through my teaching?
• Why did I choose to teach in the manner I used?
• What was I trying to achieve as a teacher?
• What did I expect my students to gain from my course: mastery of content, critical thinking skills, etc?

For example, an instructor may state that he or she wants to students to develop critical thinking skills. Then the instructor explains that this goal lead to a different style of teaching beyond the content-based lecture to include cooperative learning activities and out of class research assignments.

Sample Teaching Philosophy Statement

Professor René Descartes, Rutgers University

I believe that students learn best when they are thoroughly engaged, thinking about the material, and practicing what they have learned. For that reason, I haven’t given a normal lecture in the last ten years. Instead, I utilize techniques that scholars of teaching and learning call “active learning.” One of my favorite techniques is “think-pair-share,” where students are asked to think about a question on their own, share their answer with a partner, and then share what their partner said with the wider classroom. I also use the “jigsaw method” in which I create groups of four students and assign a specific problem to each group, then reshuffle these groups so that one member of the new group must report the findings from their previous group. I also use a method called “gallery walk” in which students get out of their seats and walk around the classroom to various whiteboard spaces, where they must contribute to a particularly difficult philosophy question. At regular intervals I ask them to proceed to the next board to find mistakes and ensure the problem is fully answered. Through these and other techniques, I keep students active and engaged in course materials.

Since I have begun using active learning techniques, students have made noticeable advances. When I used the Socratic method, only the sharpest students would truly come to understand proof of the existence of the human. Most sat in the back of lecture hall doing the Instagram and the Snapchat. Now, through judicious use of active learning, all my students come to know that they think and therefore they exist. As you will see in my next section, evidence of effectiveness, I redesigned my essays and exams to examine how deeply students understand this and other concepts. The students also clearly appreciate this focus on an engaging learning style and have told me so in my student feedback.

I have honed my teaching practices by regularly attending the Rutgers Active Learning Symposium. This day-long conference features several speakers who share insights in how active learning is best accomplished. My favorite sessions are the breakout points where we use the active learning classrooms and receive demonstrations in new teaching methods. Next semester I plan to test out Team-Based Learning (TBL) and include more games after this year’s sessions showed me how effective these approaches can be.

Overall, these teaching strategies have been extremely effective, and have delivered encouraging results. Just last week, I was approached by a young student who had been struggling at Rutgers. He explained that even though he loved learning, he found most courses tedious and the work too difficult. My course, though, had opened his eyes to the world of philosophy. He said that he was seeing the world much more logically and clearly. Specifically, he said that the “four corners” activity I presented, where students had to stand in corners of the room representing philosophical positions on morality that ended up representing positions of Plato and Aristotle, changed his life. Now, he is going to major in philosophy so that he can be sure to land a high paying job that will allow him to change the world.