932612

research-article2020
JMEXXX10.1177/1052562920932612Journal of Management EducationBeatty et al.

Lasting Impact Award 2020

Journal of Management Education

The More Things

2020, Vol. 44(5) 533­–542
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
Change, the More They sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1052562920932612
https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562920932612
Stay the Same: Teaching journals.sagepub.com/home/jmd

Philosophy Statements
and the State of Student
Learning

Joy E. Beatty1 , Jennifer Leigh2,

and Kathy Lund Dean3

Abstract
In association with the republishing of our 2009 papers, we revisit the core
ideas about teaching philosophy papers, considering how the ideas have
evolved and offering possible questions for future research on teaching
philosophy statements. We note that the role and importance of teaching
philosophy statements endures and describe some of the changes that have
enriched the learning contexts of today such as the expansion of teaching
technology. The rapid changes initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic offer
a timely opportunity to revisit and reflect upon one’s teaching philosophy
statement, since some of the improvisations faculty develop are likely to
stimulate new teaching practices.

Keywords
teaching philosophies, curriculum design, engaged learning

1
Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA
2
Nazareth College of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
3
Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, MN, USA

Corresponding Author:
Joy E. Beatty, College of Business, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197, USA.
Email: joyebeatty@gmail.com
534 Journal of Management Education 44(5)

Our two papers on teaching philosophies were motivated by our experiences

as early career educators and researchers interested in the connections
between teaching philosophy statements, educational philosophies, and clas-
sic philosophical concepts. Teaching philosophy statements were widely in
use but it seemed that they were created as a normative ritual or for job inter-
views, without a theoretical foundation; the guidance for drafting these critical
documents was lean. Thus, our aim was to offer some conceptual grounding
and an actionable exercise, to enable faculty members to grasp how their
personal beliefs about teaching and learning are actually built upon a long
and established foundation of educators who preceded them.
At their core, creating teaching philosophy statements should offer a pro-
cess of reflecting on how we think students actually learn, and how our own
practices and style of teaching can enable learning. In essential ways, the pur-
pose and role of a teaching philosophy statement have remained unchanged.
Teaching philosophy statements are still a regular aspect of one’s hiring and
promotion portfolios because, regardless of the changes with our student pop-
ulations, teaching environments, and institutional contexts, any steps that can
be taken to ground and situate our practice are beneficial. Thus, a mindful
periodic engagement and reexamination of one’s teaching philosophy is a
helpful exercise.

Fast Forward a Decade: Teaching and Learning,

2009 to 2020
As we considered ideas for this introduction about how teaching philoso-
phies have evolved in the last dozen years or so, we were struck by the scope
of changes in our own teaching practices, which we illustrate below.
Technologies that assist our teaching have become so integrated that it is
hard to remember life before them. We have a growing store of teaching
experiences that have made us a bit wiser and more focused on the macro
learning environment than we were before. Our students have changed in
ways that have demanded we modify our teaching behaviors, or risk not
reaching them. All these changes have meant modifications to our respective
teaching philosophies.
The availability and proliferation of new technology has given professors
more tools. The Open Educational Resource movement began around 2006,
and massive open online courses (MOOCs) on platforms such as Coursera,
Udacity, and EdX were launched in 2012. Both were positive steps for access
and affordability. Some observers predicted that the arrival of MOOCs would
create pressures for changing the business model of traditional universities
(The Economist, 2013), yet the role of traditional universities endures. The
Beatty et al. 535

advent of multimedia disciplinary content has influenced Joy’s teaching phi-

losophy, which now includes her role as a curator of best content pulled
together from elsewhere, rather than personally being the primary or sole
content generator. Being a curator allows her to intentionally redefine and
celebrate the teacher’s role as one combining expertise in content knowledge
with deep metacognition on how to frame and understand the elements of our
field. Rather than being threatened by slickly produced content on YouTube,
she now welcomes expanded formats such as videos, podcasts, blogs, and
articles to nurture student interaction and application, to help students craft
critically interesting and personally meaningful knowledge.
Additionally, the ever-increasing virtual learning tools have changed the
relationships between and among students and instructors. Easy digital col-
laboration has become a norm, allowing students and instructors anytime-
access to shared workspaces such as the G-Suite, MURAL, or Slack. Dynamic
content like video presentations can be quickly created and creatively man-
aged. Micro-engagements such as in-class polling and quizzing using apps
like PollEverywhere allow educators a snapshot of where student learning is
at any given moment, and an ability to triage deficits immediately. Virtual
discussions within a learning management system (LMS) increase opportuni-
ties for participation and co-creation of learning, simultaneously honoring
reflective learners while supporting active learning. Students learn from
each other, as well as from the instructor, and it is to our collective peril that
we persist in believing that the instructor is, or should be, the sole source of
“knowledge.”
It is important, though, to distinguish between the tools/technology of our
trade and our underlying teaching philosophy—they are not the same thing.
As we advocated in our earliest workshops with the teaching philosophy
cards, these shiny new tools can only enact our teaching goals, not replace
them. Technology use in the absence of a cogent roadmap guiding our beliefs
about how learning happens and how our teaching can best facilitate it is
tantamount to swapping out old cellulose acetate transparencies for elec-
tronic PowerPoints. Then and now, a reflexively created teaching philosophy
statement can prompt faculty members to review and reconsider some of
their accepted principles and beliefs about teaching and ensure that their
classroom technology supports their critical learning outcomes.
As we write this during the mass migration to online education prompted
by campus closures due to COVID-19, some faculty members, like Jennifer,
who were philosophically opposed to fully online education, are required to
adapt to this format, at least for the near term. This inescapable policy man-
date has forced her to confront deeply held views about teaching and learn-
ing. Simply put, she felt that online education would negatively impact the
536 Journal of Management Education 44(5)

interpersonal relationships and just would not be as relational as face-to-face

settings, a faculty barrier identified by researchers in the early days of online
learning in higher education (Bower, 2001). Building and maintaining con-
nections with students takes effort in any educational setting, and the online
platform offers different avenues and strategies if one has a creative outlook
and willingness to experiment with the vast array of online collaboration
tools that offer new types of digital learning community. Firmly planted in
her assumption bubble, COVID allowed her to recognize the dramatic change
in higher education delivery first-hand as the percentage of students who
have taken online classes has been increasing dramatically in the last two
decades with over one third of higher education students—5.5 million—now
taking classes online (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2017).
Jennifer found this latent shift of students’ experience with online learning
actually provided her with semi-experienced e-learning audiences in her
classes. Contrary to her long-held beliefs, she continued to develop connec-
tions with students especially in small group breakouts where there was suf-
ficient time to talk. In addition, by re-affirming her stance as a co-learner with
her classes—this time in pandemic pedagogy—her students happily offered
coaching on different LMS adaptations needed to support their learning.
When our campus classes are permitted to meet in person in the future,
teachers who avoided online platforms in the past might return to the class-
room with new perspectives on the comparative teaching modalities of face
to face, online, synchronous, and asynchronous approaches. Will teachers
continue to voluntarily use videoconference software like Zoom when they
do not have to anymore? Furthermore, how will students’ perspectives about
online methods and learning evolve or regress based on their experiences
during the transition, given the variety of experiences they will have had in
quarantine? The opportunity that the COVID-forced pivot offers for consid-
ering how we “now” believe teaching and learning can be related may be a
silver lining in a dramatically difficult landscape.
Students’ learning lives have changed in significant ways. We do not know
who our students will be when they return to us post-COVID, given the vari-
ety of experiences they will have had in quarantine as people, individual
learners, family members, workers, and citizens. For example, student isola-
tion, loneliness, disappointment, fear, and insecurity as mental health issues
have spiked during the quarantine, sometimes forcing us as instructors to
modify our connections with a student and prioritizing their mental health in
lieu of focusing on a course learning objective. Fortunately, campuses have
already been dedicating more resources to student mental health supports
(e.g., Kerr, 2020) and faculty awareness of a broader array of life situations
and learning needs bodes well for more accessible education. Student issues
Beatty et al. 537

such as food insecurity or homelessness have made their way into our aware-
ness as instructors, again forcing us to both engage with some students in
ways that prioritized immediate life needs and to confront our own privilege
anew. During this extraordinary time, and certainly since our 2009 publica-
tions, we have each come to understand our respective teaching philosophy
as a directive compass and a values anchor to reach students where they are.
Reaching students where they are underscores a notion that our students
occupy an eco-system of learning that does not privilege “classroom” learn-
ing in the same way as before. For example, since 2009, Kathy has become
more alert to students’ learning context and to the macro context in which
learning takes place. In addition to the classroom, students learn in their
internships, community-based projects, as captains or team members in their
sports teams, and many other venues. The recognition that crucial learning
opportunities can happen almost anywhere has influenced her teaching phi-
losophy. Students’ lives are complicated, and her deepened understanding of
learning allows her to support and celebrate different ways that our students
can demonstrate learning. In Kathy’s philosophy, however, one thing that has
not changed is her recognition of the limitations we have as educators in
reaching our students. After all this time, Kathy still believes that it is her
responsibility to create the most engaging, interesting, and learning-focused
environment possible, and that students still choose how or whether they take
part in it. She still realizes that she cannot care more than students do about
their own learning, a gem that has sustained her energy and emotional health
for over 20 years, and that philosophy figures clearly into her course policies,
management, and student interactions.

How Expectations Have Influenced Teaching

Philosophy
Student expectations for engagement have increased across the field, and not
only with traditionally aged undergraduate students. All students consume
content in different ways that were not available 10 years ago. For example, in
the United States, e-textbook usage increased almost 300% between 2010 and
2017 (Statista.com, n.d.) and at least one major publisher, Pearson, announced
they will adopt a “digital first” model of selling e-textbooks to students
(Barrett, 2019). While learning outcomes using e-texts (as opposed to tradi-
tional print books) continue to be under investigation (please see Lauren
Singer Trakhman’s research, for example), e-textbooks offer special features
such as text-to-speech readers, integrated dictionaries and glossaries, topical
search functions, and multimedia links, functionalities that make them attrac-
tive to students. LMS usage has reached 83% of all institutions globally, and
538 Journal of Management Education 44(5)

student satisfaction with their institution’s LMS remains high at about 75%
(EduCause, n.d.). Kathy can remember her first experience with an LMS in
1998, using a clunky product called WebCT. It was almost enough to have her
swear off LMS use forever, but today seamless and intuitive LMSs with inter-
active functions and drag-and-drop content building ease are ubiquitous; stu-
dents expect instructors to use an LMS to collate course materials, assignments,
and marks. LMS penetration has dramatically changed the “how” of our
instruction; however, our teaching philosophies are needed to guide us in how
we leverage these portals.
Another shift in expectations comes from the Universal Design for
Learning movement (www.CAST.org), which has increased attention to and
student expectations about accessibility: offering multiple, flexible methods
of presentation and expression as well as flexible options for engagement are
now standard. Students have much more control over their learning approach,
and each student can determine how they will engage because learning plat-
forms are more flexible. Philosophically, because of ease of access and cus-
tomizability, we have perhaps ratcheted up our expectations about how
students connect the dots, and how integratively they present the information
contained in any course. Students’ work is no longer limited to a finite num-
ber of resources or formats; thus, increased expectations of both engagement
and quality go both ways now.

A More Organic Concept

One aspect that was emphasized in our original papers is that a teacher has a
teaching philosophy—a singular concept. Perhaps one teaches differently to
undergraduate and graduate students, but our position is this difference would
be encapsulated within one’s broad teaching philosophy. For example, one
might believe that class content needs to be modified to match the experience
level and maturity of one’s students; this approach would be consistent with
a philosophy grounded in pragmatism which acknowledges context and prior
knowledge, and builds constructed, participative knowledge with students.
However, as we have developed our own teaching philosophies over the
years, we have started to consider how an individual teacher’s philosophy
evolves over the course of their career. Our personal teaching philosophies
are similar to our earlier selves, but now seem developmentally obsolete. As
we revisit earlier versions of our own teaching philosophy statements, we see
what we have kept as a lasting foundation and what we have jettisoned as our
practice has evolved. Having a teaching philosophy based on lived experi-
ence as well as our dreams for the future allows a liberating way to negotiate
the terms of our engagement with students in real time, iteratively, and based
Beatty et al. 539

creatively on our students’ needs. Philosophy does not live acontextually—as

we have seen in dramatic fashion with the COVID restrictions.
In all of our experiences thus far, our choices of modalities are much less
important than our orientation toward supplying a high-quality learning
experience for our students. Within each of our teaching philosophies, we
have descriptions of and language about how we understand and enact agency
from both the educator and the student perspectives. Just like with the old
jazz metaphor, which says that rules and structure establish important guard-
rails within which creativity blossoms, we firmly now understand that learn-
ing creativity comes alive within the structure of our overall philosophical
orientation toward teaching and learning. We have added more opportunities
for student agency and choice within the course learning outcomes and
design, as students change and their needs have evolved.

How Have the Teaching Philosophy Cards Been

Used?
A physical hallmark of our teaching philosophy work is the card sort activity
found in the companion article (Beatty et al., 2009), which has been used
across the globe by educators across many disciplines. In the Doctoral
Institute at the annual meeting of the Management and Organizational
Behavior Society (MOBTS), creating a draft (or revised) teaching philosophy
has been a rite of passage for participants. It has given us great pleasure when
we have heard from faculty in management, education, health and human
services, and liberal arts who have facilitated the exercise with individuals
and groups across all stages of academic careers as well.
For example, Wenona Partridge, an educational developer at the Gwenna
Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Saskatchewan,
uses the card sort exercise with graduate and postdoctoral students. She
reports that the exercise helps her students connect their taken-for-granted
thoughts about teaching and their instructional preferences with the under-
pinning educational theories. One of her participants wrote of the exercise:

I intuitively knew my teaching philosophy, but lacked the words to bring it to

life. I found the card sort exercise extremely helpful to find the words that
explains why and what I was trying to accomplish in class. Further, it helped
legitimize to myself that what I was doing in the classroom was OK, and that I
should continue to develop in the direction I was heading. For those reasons, I
found the exercise invaluable.

Dr. Mandy Frake-Mistak, an educational developer at York University’s

Teaching Commons in Toronto, uses the card sort activity in York’s teaching
540 Journal of Management Education 44(5)

dossier workshop. She comments that the exercise helps her participants
articulate, to themselves and others, what they may not have been able to
articulate when trying to write on their own.
In the past few years, the cards have experienced two significant updates.
First, during her sabbatical in 2019, Kathy did a systematic review of the cards
to add emerging concepts such as scaffolding, neuroscience, peer-learning,
wisdom, transformation, and mentorship. Second, an online app (https://app.
teachingadvantage.org/) was developed by Dr. Abby Cathcart, Dr. Dominque
Greer, and Dr. Larry Neale, who direct the Teaching Advantage Program at
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. Their
program aims to develop the higher education teaching skills of their PhD
candidates. They had been using the teaching philosophy card sort activity at
various professional development trainings throughout Asia and the Middle
East, and determined that an electronic version would save on printing costs as
well as baggage space on their trips. The open access app they created allows
anyone, anywhere to reflect upon and elaborate their teaching philosophy. An
important secondary benefit is that the online version can give anonymized
data about teaching philosophies—for example, which cards are often selected
together, and are there any patterns that can be discerned by discipline, sex,
age, nationality, or experience levels?
As we consider future research, it would be helpful to collect systematic
data on how teaching philosophies are being used. What differences exist
between one’s espoused teaching philosophy and one’s enacted teaching phi-
losophy? And can patterns be found in the evolution of individuals’ teaching
philosophy? While we have observed our own shifts, subtle and seismic,
understanding the trajectory of teaching philosophies is an open empirical
question. Fortunately, the online app is now capturing some data that will
allow early exploration of teaching philosophies in a more systematic man-
ner. We encourage others to engage in this research and to interrogate this
increasingly universal academic practice.

A Final Reflection
As we close this introduction, this gift of reflecting back on work we did so
long ago, none of us can think about these articles without thinking of Susan
Herman, who was our Journal of Management Education action editor.
Susan, a longtime MOBTS member and Journal of Management Education
associate editor, died June 24, 2009, from a cancer that took her from us with
terrible speed. It was Susan’s devotion to our ideas that allowed these arti-
cles to come to fruition. It was a single manuscript in its original submitted
form, and it went through many, many revisions, ultimately resulting in
Beatty et al. 541

these two articles. In one of her editorial letters to us, she said, “There’s
something really great here. Let’s see how we can pull it out”; indeed, her
care and vision made all the difference. It was Susan who determined it had
to be two separate articles (“It makes no sense all mixed together!”) that
allowed readers to intentionally consider the theory before engaging in the
practical exercise. It was Susan’s clear focus on what readers would want to
see that allowed us to tamp down our frustration at yet another revision
request. In addition to the articles themselves, we learned so much from
Susan’s grace, humor, and no-nonsense approach to excellence. The annual
MOBTS Service Award was named in her honor in 2015, a lasting tribute to
her light and gifts.
It is a privilege and honor for us to receive the 2020 Lasting Impact Award
from the MOBTS, and we continue to delight in all the ways our work comes
alive for the management education community and beyond.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

ORCID iD
Joy E. Beatty https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5979-3197

References
Barrett, B. (2019). The radical transformation of the textbook. Wired. https://www.
wired.com/story/digital-textbooks-radical-transformation/
Beatty, J. E., Leigh, J., & Lund Dean, K. (2009). Finding our roots: An exercise
for creating a personal teaching philosophy statement. Journal of Management
Education, 33(1), 115-130. 10.1177/1052562907310642
Bower, B. L. (2001). Distance education: Facing the faculty challenge. Online Journal
of Distance Learning Administration, 4(2). https://www.westga.edu/~distance/
ojdla/summer42/bower42.html
The Economist. (2013, October 1). Will MOOCs kill university degrees? https://www.
economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/10/01/will-moocs-kill-university-
degrees
EduCause. (n.d.). LMS use and satisfaction. https://www.educause.edu/ecar/research-
publications/ecar-study-of-undergraduate-students-and-information-technol-
ogy/2018/lms-use-and-satisfaction
542 Journal of Management Education 44(5)

Kerr, E. (2020, April 27). How college students manage coronavirus stress. U.S.News
& World Report. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-
college-students-are-managing-coronavirus-stress
National Center for Educational Statistics. (2017). Distance learning. https://nces.
ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=80
Statista.com. (n.d.). Number of e-books sold in the United States from 2010 to 2017.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/426799/e-book-unit-sales-usa/