Minutes prepared by David King

Meeting of Fri Sept 15, 2006.
Faculty present: Anne Gelb, and Matthias Kawski.
Students present: not available

• How to Prepare a Teaching Statement
  At first I was not quite clear on what a teaching statement kind of looked like. For myself, I wrote a statement that was kind of brief a to the point. It highlighted my accomplishments and well, in a word, it was really boring. Everyone had a chance to go up and show their teaching statement, for myself I didn't want to go up and show mine.

  But we did get to see some really great teaching statements. Mohammed Dur-e-ahmad really had a great Idea. The group really liked his and we also really liked Yan Lu's.

  Mohammed had his paper divided into three sections: Teaching Philosophy, Teaching Methods, and Teaching Experience. This was a great idea. Because in the Teaching Philosophy section he really got to tell a story. Matthias Emphasized this, it is better to really give a concrete example, where you really go into detail on how you helped a person than to just gloss over your general accomplishments and not really go into depth on anything

• Tell A Story!
  

  Show the reader, don't talk about what you did demonstrate what you did. Yan Lu went into detail on how she loves helping people and where their motivation comes from, this is a good idea. My teaching statement was too impersonal and too bland. We all liked the layout of Mohammed's and the depth that he covered. Mathias mentioned that you should carefully look at the Job advertisement and read it carefully make sure you look yours over and make sure you have Keywords just in case you leave them out.

  Again be attuned to grammar and spelling mistakes they can kill you if you are careless. Make sure you spend the time on this as people will look at this carefully and if you are applying to a teaching school this statement is all important.

  We mainly just went over all of our teaching statements and it was good to look at all of them we learned a lot as a group. That is all, thanks for listening.