Expressing your teaching philosophy in 10 words can be a short but powerful way to reflect on your teaching values and practices. We asked the recipients of Oakland University’s 2025 Teaching Awards to share their Teaching in 10 Words, plus a little more on those 10 words. 

How would you sum up your teaching in 10 words? Fill out the Teaching in 10 Words form to share your short teaching statement.

Try New Things

Jeffrey Insko, Teaching Excellence Award

“I try all things,” says Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “I achieve what I can.” “I am only an experimenter,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Circles,” “I unsettle all things.” I’m not much for dispensing pedagogical advice, but I think you could do worse than to approach the enterprise in the spirit of Melville and Emerson. Learning— and teaching, too— is fundamentally a matter of finding out what you don’t know. That can be risky and discomfiting— but also rewarding. So try new things, ask students to try new things, refuse the transactional model of education. Some experiments will fail, but they will be good failures. Emerson (again) said it best: “People [students, teachers] wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Turn Off Automatic Pilot

Randall Engle, Excellence in Teaching Award

Each new class session, each new semester, each new year, turn off automatic pilot.  It’s easy to warm up leftovers, but students crave something fresh and meaty.  Challenge yourself to new insights, approaches, and methodologies and students’ participation will move from bland to animated. Before stepping into the classroom, I tell myself that I am not a “talking head” who is there to mete out facts, but I am an archaeologist who has just returned from a dig with unearthed, priceless treasure:  I’m excited to tell my students about the find! I share its value, why it matters; and if you have something to say, delivery takes care of itself. If the connections take, it means that knowledge has become alive, and learning feels animated and crisp––with “every step an arrival,” says Rilke. Turning off automatic pilot can be one of the most animating things you can do.

Inspire curiosity with memorable learning experiences in an engaging, inquiry-driven community.

Suzanne Spencer-Wood, Online Teaching Excellence Award

Students call my teaching passionate, inspirational and even electric! Several students said my belief in their abilities is inspirational, as I teach students to learn using scientific research and study methods. I inspire curiosity and critical thinking by creating a questioning learning community and showing students the joy and fun of learning surprising new insights about our world. I structure lectures around a logical series of ever-deeper questions to stimulate discussions. Further, I created many hands-on learning experiences, service-learning research projects, and field trips for students to learn by doing. I show videos because the new field of neuroaesthetics research found that viewing beautiful landscapes, sites or artifacts stimulates hormones that increase attention, emotional engagement, and therefore motivation, memory and learning. My teaching embodies research findings that students are motivated to learn by being truly seen, respected, cared about and valued, through active listening to student contributions to discussions.

Image by Madeline Shea, created for CETL. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC

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