The Teaching Statement Assignment as a Process and a Product: Supporting Reflective Teachers in Graduate Pedagogy Courses

This research examines how graduate pedagogy courses at a large Midwestern U.S. university facilitate reflective teaching practices among graduate students, through the common assignment of drafting and revising a statement of teaching philosophy. A validated rubric was applied to 188 paired teaching statements (94 draft and 94 final versions) from 6 different graduate pedagogy courses, allowing researchers to compare across courses and disciplines how these graduate students develop as individuals who systematically reflect on their teaching practice (i.e., become scholarly teachers). An anonymous survey collected students’ perspectives on the process of the teaching statement assignment. As the third prong of a multi-pronged large-scale research project about graduate pedagogy courses, this research finds that both the process and the product of preparing a teaching statement (as part of a graduate pedagogy course) helped graduate students become more reflective teachers. Students valued the process of learning about, drafting, and revising a teaching statement. They wanted timely feedback yet recognized revision limitations during a single semester. As a product, the teaching statement quality improved in their final versions, according to the standardized rubric. This research presents generalizable results for individual graduate pedagogy courses beyond a single course, discipline, or institution.