Week 5 - Activity 2: My online teaching philosophy
Week 5 - Activity 2: My online teaching philosophy
In this activity, you will pull together everything we have explored over the last four weeks to create and share a statement of your online teaching philosophy as a “capstone” to our FLO course.
What is a teaching philosophy statement?
A teaching philosophy statement is “a written description of your values, goals, and beliefs regarding both teaching and learning and uses evidence from your teaching to make the case that you have excelled as a teacher” (Centre for Teaching and Learning, Western University Canada). Importantly, a statement of teaching philosophy is unique to the individual and depending on several factors, including the context of the teaching/learning experience. In other words, your face-to-face teaching philosophy statement may be (and should be!) slightly different to your online teaching philosophy statement. Read Dr. Oleksandr (Sasha) Kondrashov's online teaching philosophy as an example.
Why prepare an online teaching philosophy statement?
If you have some experience with teaching or applying for teaching positions, you may be familiar with this genre of writing as many teaching positions require a teaching philosophy statement as part of their application process. When designing this activity, we wanted our FLO participants to come away from FLO not only with key learnings and knowledge that would support them in their teaching, but to have done so through learning activities that were practical, reflecting RRU’s Learning, Teaching, and Research Model (LTRM) with emphasis on learning that is applied and authentic.
What should my online teaching philosophy statement include?
Your online teaching philosophy statement should be a 400-500 word statement that addresses this question: What are my values, goals and/or beliefs about facilitating learning online? For each value/goal/belief, you should provide specific examples of teaching practices (existing or aspirational) that demonstrate the value/goal/belief.
Where to start?
We
have intentionally designed the course so the work you have been doing from
week 1 builds up to this final task. Many of the questions that you have been
answering in your peer-to-peer activities as well as your learning journal are
directly relevant to your online teaching philosophy statement, so feel free to
use, edit, and adapt the work you’ve already done to support you in this task.
Working in pairs or trios
The peer facilitators will post the organization of pairs or trios early in the week. You will give feedback to your assigned partner/s.
Breaking down this activity
There are three parts to this learning activity:
- Draft your online teaching philosophy statement (400-500 words) and post it in the thread with your name (peer facilitators will create these threads at the start of the week). Please do this by the end of the day on Tuesday.
- Give feedback to your partner. Your feedback should be appreciative as well as generative, focusing on the strengths that your partner should keep as well as ideas and opportunities for strengthening the effectiveness of the statement. Please do this by the end of the day on Wednesday.
- Based on the feedback you receive from your partner, as well as inspiration drawn from other people’s statements, revise your online teaching philosophy statement and post your updated version in your thread. Please do this by the end of the day on Thursday.
Note for peer facilitators
Peer facilitators will also complete their online teaching philosophy, and will give feedback to each other's online teaching philosophy as well as participants' posts.
[Note for FLO facilitators: We recommend you include an audio option for the text above here if using a platform that does not have an audio feature built in. Remove this note before offering starts.]