Teaching Statements

An accessible version of the documents on this site will be made available upon request. Contact cte@ku.edu to request the document be made available in an accessible format.

 

One critical source of information for the evaluation of teaching at KU is material that the instructor being evaluated puts together to document and represent their teaching. The Instructor Statement, or Self-Reflection, is the centerpiece of an instructor's documentation of their teaching. The statement(s) should go beyond philosophy of teaching. Use it to explain what and how you teach, giving specific examples to illustrate why you use the approaches you do and (very importantly) how you know whether those approaches are effective (i.e., the intellectual work involved in teaching). The Benchmarks dimensions and rubric can structure these reflective statements. In short, the reflective statement will center on these sorts of questions: 

  • What are your goals for student learning in your course(s) and why?
  • What approaches do you use to help students achieve these goals?
  • How do you know that students are achieving them?
  • How have your teaching experiences shaped your ongoing goals and practices as a teacher?

You can see that this set of questions asks about the kind of consideration of your teaching that’s been highlighted on this page. If you’ve been taking time each semester to think back on a course, you’ll have this part already done. It’s most important to show the growth of a course, rather than document every aspect of every course. By capturing the essence of how a course has changed over multiple offerings, you provide your colleagues with a good representation of your thinking, planning, and growing as a teacher.

The Benchmarks Framework page provides more detailed prompts and tools to guide self-reflective statements (a self-reflection narrative guide and a short form for self-reflection), along with suggestions for supporting documentation. This guidance is adaptable for P&T, multi-term, or annual reviews.  

For an example of this kind of writing, see this sample teaching statement (doc).