Polishing for impact: Integrating theory and scholarship

For tenure, promotion, teaching awards, or other academic review processes, your teaching philosophy should demonstrate the educational reasoning behind your pedagogical choices. Integrating theory and scholarship helps explain the thinking, values, and evidence informing your teaching practices and demonstrates engagement with evidence-informed approaches to student learning.

This resource is part 3 of the Polishing for impact series, designed to help you transform your initial teaching philosophy draft into a compelling narrative:

Strategies for Success

Know your audience

Before you pick your evidence, think about who’s reading your work:

  • Department colleagues: They want to see how you’ve adapted traditional methods for your specific field.
  • National teaching organization: These reviewers look for deep engagement with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).
  • University-level award committees: These groups look for a signature teaching philosophy that contributes to the U of A teaching culture.

Identify your pedagogical orientations

A teaching philosophy statement is most effective when it moves beyond what you do to why your practices are supported by scholarly evidence. While your classroom strategies may feel intuitive, they are likely rooted in established philosophical orientations. Identifying your orientation(s) allows you to name the underlying logic of your approach to student learning and align your philosophical goals with your methods.

Most teaching practices draw from multiple philosophical orientations rather than a single approach. Pedagogical approaches may also look different across disciplines, learning environments, and professional contexts.

Using the table below, connect your approaches to teaching to common philosophical orientations in education.

Orientation Description Examples
Humanism Focuses on student autonomy, well-being, and the growth of the whole person. Providing flexible assessment options to support student agency.
Liberalism Emphasizes the development of critical thinking, rational thought, and a broad base of knowledge. Using Socratic questioning to develop intellectual rigour and analytical breadth.
Constructivism The belief that learners actively construct knowledge through experience rather than passive absorption. Using inquiry-based lab work or case studies to discover concepts.
Social Constructivism Suggests that learning is a shared experience in which understanding is co-created through social processes. Facilitating peer-to-peer dialogue, group projects, or interactive seminars.
Indigenous Ways of Knowing Focuses on relationality, reciprocity, and a collective responsibility to the community, land, and ways of knowing. Incorporating land-based learning, circle pedagogies, and oral storytelling.
Critical Pedagogy Aims to empower learners to challenge power structures, inequity, and oppression. Decolonizing a syllabus or integrating marginalized voices into the curriculum.
Behaviourism Focuses on observable changes through reinforcement, mastery, and repetitive practice. Using frequent low-stakes quizzes with immediate feedback to gauge skill mastery.

Strategies for integrating theory and scholarship

Begin with a teaching practice, learning challenge, or student outcome, then connect the educational reasoning or scholarship informing that approach.

  • Combine perspectives: Don’t feel pressured to pick just one; most instructors use two or three.
  • Practice first: Avoid starting with dictionary definitions. Instead, lead with your classroom practice and use the theory to explain the result.
    • Example: “To ensure learning is a social process, I use case-based learning. This constructivist approach allows students to build understanding through peer-to-peer dialogue.”

Ground your practice in scholarly literature

Effective teaching is more than just intuition; it is an informed practice. While some educators participate in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), which involves conducting and publishing original pedagogical research, the primary goal of a teaching philosophy statement is to show how your teaching practices are informed by existing scholarship, evidence, and educational reasoning.

You don’t need to conduct new studies to be a scholarly educator; you simply need to show that your practice is informed by evidence.

Key distinction: Scholarly teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) are related but distinct practices. Scholarly teaching involves using evidence, educational theory, disciplinary knowledge, and reflection to inform teaching decisions and support student learning. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) goes further by systematically investigating questions about teaching and learning and sharing those findings publicly through presentations, publications, or other forms of dissemination.

A strong teaching philosophy statement does not require original SoTL research. More commonly, teaching philosophy statements demonstrate scholarly teaching by explaining how educational evidence, disciplinary perspectives, or pedagogical approaches inform practice.

Why scholarship matters in a philosophy statement

Including scholarship of teaching provides external validation for your methods. It moves your statement beyond “what I do” to “why I do it,” and shows selection committees that you are:

  • Evidence-based: You make decisions based on what is proven to support student learning.
  • Intentional: Your course design is a result of deliberate study, not habit.
  • Current: You stay informed about developments in higher education.

How to demonstrate scholarly teaching

You don’t need to write a literature review. Instead, weave brief, purposeful references into your narrative to show that your approach is informed.

  • If you use small group work, briefly mention that your approach is grounded in social constructivism or collaborative learning theory.
  • Explain how concepts such as Universal Design for Learning inform your syllabus design and grading.
  • Identify how current research has informed your approach to common practices in your field, such as lab-based learning in biology or case studies in marketing education.
  • Mention a specific book or foundational study that fundamentally changed your approach to teaching and learning.

Show the impact

Move beyond what you do to what the impact is on your students and the university. Consider using:

  • Student feedback: Use specific quotes that highlight the results of your pedagogical choices.
  • Peer validation: Include excerpts from peer observation that mention your use of evidence-based methods.
  • SoTL contributions: If applicable, include conference presentations or journal articles as evidence that your personal teaching practice contributes to the broader academic community.

Self-Check

Use this checklist to ensure your statement is ready for your audience:

  • Is it purpose-driven? Does it clearly address the criteria for the award, tenure, or promotion?
  • Is it contextualized? Does it reflect the unique challenges and traditions of your specific discipline?
  • Is it evidence-informed? Have you meaningfully connected your educational practices to relevant scholarship, theory, or evidence-informed approaches?
  • Is the educational reasoning clear? Does the statement explain why you make particular pedagogical choices and how those choices support student learning?
  • Is it grounded in practice? Does the narrative reflect your actual educational values, learning environment, and teaching practices?

Putting it into practice

  • Which 2-3 philosophical orientations reflect your approach to student learning and the learning environment you aim to create?
  • Pick one specific teaching challenge you’ve faced. What is one article, book, or study that helped you solve it? This may serve as a meaningful scholarly reference in your statement.

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