12 Teaching excellence plus: The teaching philosophy statement as creative platform for strategic self-promotion

Theoretically, the teaching philosophy statement (TPS) is a self-reflective document that articulates your core beliefs as an instructor about teaching and learning and explains your values, goals, and strategies for fostering student success. But let’s face it: the TPS can feel like the most awkward and performative of professional documents—an uncomfortable hurdle to jump with every application, annual review, and promotion, which makes many instructors, regardless of rank, dread writing (and rewriting) it. At its best, the TPS captures your authentic voice and professional identity, and it paints a clear picture of how you approach the classroom. Yet, in practice, the TPS too often devolves into a painful bureaucratic exercise—more of a perfunctory, institutionally-driven performance than a genuinely self-reflective expression of praxis rooted in creative agency. Further, while there is a whole field of literature insisting on the importance of this central document for promotion, the TPS is rarely positioned as a strategic, rhetorical space for recursively self-fashioning and self-advocating your professional instructional identity.

In this chapter, we flip that script by centering your creativity, agency, and voice in the TPS writing process. We reorient the teaching philosophy statement by connecting promotion with self-promotion, shifting from an externally focused institutional mindset to a more intrinsically motivated, self-advocating one. We call our approach “Teaching Excellence Plus” because it invites you to embrace the TPS as both an institutional tool for academic promotion and a dynamic, evolving space for cultivating your creative professional brand. Rooted in our larger professional development framework, “Branding Your Teaching Excellence” (BYTE), this chapter contributes to a growing body of scholarship on academic branding by extending conversations about visibility, professional identity, and communication ethics to the realm of teaching. We insist “branding” doesn’t belong only to capitalists and entrepreneurs—it’s a creative act of crafting and claiming your unique instructional voice. Approached this way, branding becomes a strategy for distilling and documenting your teaching excellence through powerful, value-driven storytelling.

Our approach is shaped by years of practical experience working with instructors across ranks and institutions. As former writing program administrators (WPAs) in our university’s general education (GenEd) Composition and Intensive Writing program, we trained and mentored hundreds of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in designing and teaching writing courses and preparing professional materials—including teaching philosophy statements—for the academic job market. Since then, we’ve continued to lead professional development programming across our multi-campus university and at other institutions, helping faculty at all stages craft strategic teaching documentation, portfolios, and multimodal artifacts that articulate their distinct instructional identity and impact. These experiences deeply inform our belief that the TPS can be transformed into a platform for meaningful storytelling—one that coheres and amplifies your values, voice, and vision as an instructor.

We see branding as both product and process, and we define a “teaching brand” as the creative, strategic story you tell about your values, commitments, and professional identity—one that becomes distinctly yours. This story should be thoughtfully informed by the scholarship of teaching and learning and reflect how you uniquely manifest those best practices in your praxis. As your praxis inevitably evolves, branding becomes a recursive process through which you continually refine and retell this story to yourself and others. Within a branding framework, the TPS no longer functions as just one document among others in a teaching portfolio; it becomes a central platform guiding your pedagogical and professional choices. In this “plus” model, your TPS serves not merely as a thesis statement but as the brand strategy that marshals the rest of your teaching portfolio as its body of evidence demonstrating the impact of your instructional excellence. Rather than dreading the act of writing (or rewriting) your TPS, a branded mindset invites you to embrace it as a space for self-fashioning and self-advocacy. This chapter begins by examining the TPS as a tool for self-promotion and the messages that have historically undermined instructor agency. We then offer concrete steps and activities to help you move beyond box-checking into the kind of dynamic self-discovery that crystallizes your brand and roots it at the center of your TPS.

Prevailing Approaches to the TPS

It’s worth noting that while academic “promotion” is something higher education expects instructors to pursue, “self-promotion” often gets a bad rap. After all, teaching is service-oriented, and instructors are expected to be self-effacing. This tension between declaration and humility makes the TPS tricky to write—it requires walking a tightrope between asserting teaching excellence and projecting a modest persona that centers students, departments, institutions, and the field. Because TPS writing is often triggered by employment and competitive processes, such as annual reviews or applications for jobs and awards, the genre can become a space for performative box-checking that does little to empower your teaching brand.

Traditional guidance on the TPS often moves in two unsatisfying directions. One offers grand, vague gestures. The other is overly narrow, presenting laundry lists that, especially for less experienced instructors, can quickly muddy the narrative. Philosophical guidance from university teaching centers often emphasizes beliefs about teaching—such as the purpose of higher education or discipline-specific goals. Yet, as Pratt (2005) notes, many institutions have “borrowed their guidelines from other universities,” creating a misleading appearance of “consensus” about “the form and substance of a philosophy of teaching statement” (p. 32). These templates tend to emphasize goals and methods while neglecting deeper reflection on values, beliefs, and disciplinary context, producing documents that are “less than … useful … in rigorous peer reviews of teaching” (p. 32–33). Schönwetter et al. (2002) similarly argue that most guidance lacks a clear operational definition or conceptual framework for constructing a coherent, context-aware TPS. More pointed advice asks instructors to show how their teaching methods reflect their beliefs and have evolved (Seldin et al., 2010), but even this can lead to grand narratives of progress. Some guidance treats the TPS as a writing sample and CV companion (Ansburg et al., 2022) without providing models for what that looks like in practice. Other advice overwhelms, suggesting the TPS should address everything from a philosophy of reading to discipline to technology (Wyatt & Looper, 2004, p. 47). These approaches often trigger a cluttered mix of buzzwords and trending practices. As Barbeau and Cornejo Happel (2003) observe, the “intensely personal nature of these statements makes it difficult to provide definitive guidance on what they should include or how they should be written” (p. 144).

While existing resources rightly emphasize the importance of the TPS within the teaching portfolio, we believe they often miss the opportunity to provide concrete guidance for using it as a storytelling tool—one that grounds claims, evidence, and examples in a distinctive teaching brand aligned with your values, commitments, and professional identity. Reframing the TPS as a strategic, developmental tool—as Caukin and Brinthaupt (2017) suggest—means designing it not simply as a finished product, but as a rhetorical and professional development process that fosters deeper reflection, identity formation, and alignment between belief and practice. Yet rather than supporting this more inwardly reflective and rhetorically empowering approach, much guidance continues to reinforce the genre’s anxious association with external validation and accreditation. Worse, if you aren’t already clear about what defines your particular brand of teaching excellence—or if you haven’t yet cultivated a confident voice—this guidance can leave you at sea, chasing broad claims or narrativizing a checklist of courses and methods. Regardless of what prompts you to write or revise your TPS, we believe the first step is understanding that you should be driving the genre, not allowing it to drive you.

Rather than unconsciously accepting the genre as an externally imposed bureaucratic necessity, our framework invites you to embrace the TPS as the foundation of your branding work. This approach aligns with a growing body of scholarship that frames branding in higher education not simply as a marketing tactic but as a tool for professional identity, ethical communication, and self-advocacy. In Academic Brands: Distinction in Global Higher Education (Biagioli & Sunder, 2022), branding is described as the university’s default language of excellence and self-representation in an era of intensified competition, privatization, and rankings. Although the authors offer a critically ambivalent view of higher education’s “recent adoption of corporate managerial culture,” they argue the university is “receptive to brand culture” precisely because “it was always already one”—suggesting that education has long framed “the interaction between the university and its students as a form of brand-building, the students making the university what it is, and vice versa” (p. 26).

Zooming in from institutions to individuals, Academic Branding (Howard, 2024) and BrandED (Sheninger & Rubin, 2017) position branding as a way for educators to craft strategic, values-driven narratives that connect personal identity to audience perception. Both Howard and Trybulkevych et al. (2021) note the discomfort many educators feel, associating branding with inauthentic self-promotion or commodification. Echoing Biagioli and Sunder, this concern reflects a broader tension between branding and teaching’s service-oriented ethos. Yet Howard reframes branding as a process for clarifying one’s “unique identity” across “values, personality, and professional experience” to enhance “visibility, authority, and income”—especially for academics seeking broader impact (p. 5, p. 3). Likewise, Trybulkevych et al. emphasize trust and ethics, arguing that “[p]romoting expertise and building trust through a self-branding strategy is becoming an indispensable part of a teacher’s job” (p. 641). Their study shows how intentional self-branding—grounded in reflection, values, and community—can build both confidence and credibility.

Together, this emerging literature demonstrates that branding, when approached with clarity and integrity, can ethically affirm professional identity. Our work builds on these insights by shifting the focus to teaching and professional self-advocacy. We define a “teaching brand” as the strategic, values-based story you tell about your instructional identity—a story we believe is best centered in the TPS. Where prior scholarship has emphasized institutional branding, social media use, or research visibility, we focus on reframing the university’s traditional promotion-focused documents as critical sites of brand-building, and we position the TPS as the primary platform for communicating your distinct, authentic, and empowering brand narrative of teaching excellence.

Our goal is not to replace the existing guidance on what a TPS should include, such as how to connect your teaching to research, service, or institutional goals. Instead, we offer a strategic foundation to supplement that guidance: a narrative-first approach that helps instructors distill a cohesive brand identity that drives the content and structure of their TPS. We see branding and writing as inseparable, recursive acts. Branding your teaching is not just about “style” or personality but about articulating a strategic vision that shapes what you include, how you frame it, and why it matters. A branding mindset brings greater unity to your TPS and strengthens its connection to other documents through a persuasive, self-advocating narrative.

The Branded TPS

Because a branded TPS reflects your unique story, we caution against adopting someone else’s structure and simply swapping in your own content, key terms, or examples. It’s easy to fall into the “plug and play” trap, especially when handed an “exemplary” TPS by a colleague, coach, or administrator. While that can feel reassuring, the result often fails to stand out or, worse, reads as inauthentic. Reviewing models within and beyond your field can be useful but branding means doing the harder work of crafting a unified, strategic story—one that captures a recognizable teaching signature, drives your writing, and sets you apart. Borrowing someone else’s framework or philosophy can’t accomplish that.

While the scholarship on academic branding agrees on the importance of storytelling and distilling a “unique identity,” branding your TPS is not simply a matter of foregrounding your keywords, values, and accomplishments (Howard, 2025, p. 5). Branding the TPS means showing readers what these look like in action. Good storytelling makes vivid and memorable both the how and why of your teaching, illustrating, for instance, how pedagogical principles such as accessibility or metacognition inform your classroom and teaching materials. Too often, we see versions of the TPS organized around lofty, abstract claims. While these claims might point to important and timely values, these writers do themselves a disservice by not grounding theoretical gestures in compelling, strategically chosen, and explicitly framed concrete examples, enabling the reader to see what these values distinctly look like in this instructor’s hands. To accomplish both moves of painting pictures and avoiding abstraction, it’s essential to strike a thoughtful balance between large claims and illustrative examples. Imagine the TPS as a window into your classroom. Readers should come away with a vivid impression of what your courses look and feel like: how the space is shaped, how ideas come alive, and how learners are invited to engage.

Moreover, the story your TPS tells should illustrate how you are connecting what you do in your classroom to the theories and best practices about teaching and learning in your field. Your TPS should show exactly how these best practices shape your branded approach to teaching and curriculum design; but note that, despite the genre’s name, you are not asked to “philosophize.” Rather, within the TPS’s compressed space, you need to clearly and succinctly explain what you do and the rationale for how and why you enact these behaviors for student success. Good storytelling in this genre means articulating the connections between the what, why, and how of your teaching in a way that gestures to the whole through strategically selected and curated parts, all chosen for maximum effect and efficiency.

Regardless of your discipline and context, which may require some slight alterations, a TPS should be approximately two pages (roughly 1,000 words). It’s impossible to showcase the full breadth of your teaching excellence within this concise format—nor is that the genre’s purpose. Leave that to your larger portfolio, keeping in mind that the TPS is the centerpiece delivering a succinct narrative or argument, not the sum total of your work. If you are a long-winded writer, avoid overpacking your suitcase by prioritizing only your most salient claims and examples.

Even with a succinct two-page TPS in hand, you’ll ultimately need to craft different versions that appear in various places and formats. While strategic variation is key to long-term success, avoid an ad-hoc approach. Start with one central TPS—think of this as the original, opportunity-agnostic version—that serves as your core text. From there, iterate versions for different audiences and opportunities, clearly and consistently anchoring them in your core values and brand identity. For example, when applying to teaching jobs or opportunities like grants or awards, tailor sections of your TPS to reflect thoughtful engagement with the institution’s values and language. This can set you apart and does not mean compromising your brand identity to appease a particular audience. Rather, it demonstrates how your authentic, enduring brand connects to—or innovates upon—the institution’s values. Likewise, different modalities invite thoughtful tailoring and experimentation. Digitally remediated versions—such as a short explainer video or a webpage—can deliver your TPS in inventive, multimodal ways with embedded links or visuals. This aligns with Sharmin and Chow’s (2023) call to “mov[e] outside the TPS box” by using non-traditional formats, like video introductions and reflective essays, to communicate teaching values in more dynamic and personalized ways (p. 327).

Steps for Drafting a Branded TPS

The iterative “passes” we introduce here are our own design, but they are grounded in widely accepted best practices in teaching and learning. In particular, our approach draws inspiration from the systematic framework developed by Barbeau and Cornejo Happel in Critical Teaching Behaviors, which identifies high-level teaching practices that are research-based, adaptable across contexts, and visible and assessable by peers (p. viii). The activities anchoring each of our passes build on the reflection, evidence-gathering, and peer dialogue central to Barbeau and Happel’s framework, which itself extends a broader tradition of scholarly, transparent, and evidence-informed teaching development.

Central to our approach is understanding that every aspect of the branding process is iterative, intentional, and rooted in deeply self-reflective, self-aware work. So, we caution you not to jump into writing/rewriting your TPS too quickly. The following process guides you to create space before drafting to do the intellectual and creative work of defining your brand so that it can become the centerpiece of your TPS, which in turn, becomes the centerpiece of your teaching portfolio. Moreover, despite the visual check-boxes below, these steps are not intended as a prescriptive, forward-moving path marching you in a straight line from blank page to final document. Rather, they are suggested iterative “passes”—manageable, meaningful activities you can repeat multiple times in a flexible order—intended to break down your TPS planning and writing process, guide important self-reflection and self-awareness, and ultimately produce the pieces you can assemble into a powerful narrative about your philosophical approach to teaching.

Pass 1: Reflect

Why begin with reflection? Because powerful, memorable brands are constructed from the inside out. They’re rooted in authenticity and clear-eyed introspection. By beginning here, you’ll locate and harness your passions—an approach that, as Tlali and Lefoka (2023) demonstrate, deepens an educator’s self-awareness and prompts meaningful shifts in praxis that help articulate evolving pedagogical values, inspire a shift toward more student-centered teaching practices, and better align classroom choices with core beliefs. The more and better you do this, the easier it becomes to write a TPS that documents teaching excellence with a sense of self-empowerment and agency.

• Brainstorm: What makes you feel passionate about teaching and learning? Grab a pen or tool of your choice, and capture in words and phrases, however informally, the feelings and experiences that drive you as an educator.
• Recall: Think through your favorite teaching memories, anything from a student success story to a “greatest hits” lesson plan. Now, choose just three of these vignettes and describe how they illustrate your passion and values, and how those are informed by best practices in the scholarship of teaching and learning as well as your field.
• Distill: Grab a notecard or small piece of paper and generate no more than three to five vivid keywords that capture the connection between your internal passion and values and their external manifestation in your approach to teaching, learning, and course design.
• Concretize: Turn this into a single-sentence mantra or articulation of your overarching teaching philosophy.

Pass 2: Annotate

If you have a current or past TPS, review it. What do you like or appreciate about it, and why? What does it fail to capture, and why? Thoughtfully highlight and insert comments identifying the sentences or sections that feel authentic and worth keeping, as well as what feels inauthentic. For instance, were you enacting the dreaded “plug and play”? Which components feel trendy, performative, generic, confusing, or dated?

• Assess: Does your former TPS– whichever version(s) you used in the past—feel like an extension of the single-sentence mantra that emerged in the previous step? Why and why not? What does this prompt you to consider?
• Visualize: Paste the content of your former TPS into an online word cloud generator. Which keywords are the most prominent? Which keywords exist in the periphery rather than at the center, where you might expect them? What, if anything, does this exercise prompt you to consider?

Pass 3: Sort

We all have multiple aspects, ideas, and philosophies that drive our teaching, but can you concisely articulate and draw the connections between them? For instance, no one teaches solely via the Socratic method or only values active learning or accessibility. Think about your teaching philosophy as a puzzle where you piece together theories and best practices in your field and discipline with your own professional values and commitments. How do your pieces uniquely fit together? How do they inform one another, and what is the holistic image that emerges?

• Doodle (Option 1): Using either high-tech or low-tech tools of your choice (whether that is paper and markers or a digital whiteboard), sketch out the primary, secondary, and/or tertiary theories or practices that inform the way you teach as well as the layers of values and commitments that shape how you design and deliver instruction (i.e., visually lay out all your “puzzle pieces”).

and/or

• Dictate (Option 2): Using either dictation software or the writing tools of your choice (whether that is paper or word processing software), articulate the primary, secondary, and/or tertiary theories or practices that inform the way you teach as well as the layers of values and commitments that shape how you design and deliver instruction (i.e., verbally lay out all your “puzzle pieces”).

Pass 4: Connect

Now that you’ve identified the key pieces and how they connect, you can begin crafting the unique, compelling story your teaching tells. While many of us share similar puzzle pieces, it’s the narrative—the way you put those pieces together—that distinguishes the picture of your teaching from others.

• Prioritize: Group and rank your key claims about your teaching (i.e., what defines or characterizes your teaching and why) and then choose the most vivid and persuasive evidence and anecdotes that best support them in order of importance.
• Strategize: Recognizing that your TPS is abbreviated by necessity of the genre, you need to convey the expanse of your teaching excellence in the most succinct way possible. Think critically about your priorities. Are there any weak links that can be removed in the interest of showcasing only your top priorities?
• Outline: What moves do you want to make throughout your TPS, and how do you plan to organize and connect the different pieces? Decide how much space you want to dedicate to each key claim and its supporting evidence, as well as their most strategic order. Keep your audience in mind, anticipating what order makes the most sense and what might require more context or explanation for them to understand and value it.

Pass 5: Draft

Believe it or not, there is a playful freedom to drafting. This stage isn’t about getting the TPS perfect on the first try—it’s about discovering how to tell the story of your teaching. Your TPS should express your passion, values, and impact, not feel like a boring, externally imposed assignment. Drafting is not only a creative act but an act of creation: a space to explore, shape, and showcase your unique brand. We encourage you to release yourself from the anxiety that often paralyzes the writing process. Later passes will help you refine your draft through feedback, but for now, don’t be intimidated by the blank page. Embrace it by drafting multiple messy versions using the prompts below. Because branding is storytelling, we’ve structured these passes around story craft. They can be completed in any order and repeated as often as needed.

• Plot & Structure:
  • What is your story? How will it open? What note do you want to end on?
  • In each section and/or paragraph, what is the main idea and central evidence or anecdote? How does it help you gesture to other parts of your teaching that you don’t have room here to fully unpack?