On Keeping a Teaching Journal

Article by Tara DaPra, Teaching Professor & 2024-25 Instructional Development Consultant

On the last day of the semester, I read the Brendan Kennelly poem “Begin” to my creative writing students, which ends thus: “Though we live in a world that dreams of ending/that always seems about to give in/something that will not acknowledge conclusion/insists that we forever begin.” It’s the perfect poem to describe the commotion of the semester’s end, so when I share this with my students, I acknowledge the desperation many of us feel to get to the other side.

But then what? As the poem instructs, we do it all again. I tell my students that it’s okay if the semester didn’t go just as they’d hoped, that they can try again. They have another semester to accomplish a little more, to do a little better, to become a little stronger. And in the meantime, they should acknowledge all that they have achieved and take a moment to celebrate. And we, their professors can do the same.

What does any of this have to do with a teaching journal?

Whether or not you keep one, you already know what a teaching journal is, but here’s a definition for good measure. In their book Professional Development for Language Teachers, Richards and Farrell define a teaching journal as “an ongoing written account of observations, reflections, and other thoughts about teaching, … which serves as a source of discussion, reflection, or evaluation” (68). If you’re not in the practice of keeping a teaching journal, try responding to formal or informal prompts after an ordinary day of teaching—or a particularly tough one: Which part of today’s class was most successful? Least successful? Did students contribute actively? How did I organize and interact with groups? What did students truly learn?

Richards and Farrell distinguish between an intrapersonal journal, written for oneself, and a dialogical journal, written for another. Many of us learned to keep a dialogical teaching journal as graduate students. In Ohio University’s TA Pedagogy Seminar, teaching assistants are instructed to write at least one entry each week, monitored by the supervising professor. While our teaching today is largely an independent practice, a dialogical journal may still be useful, for example, if you co-teach a course or if you and your colleagues who teach the same general education course wish to compare notes.

But all of us can benefit from an intrapersonal journal, a record of our teaching wins and defeats, a record of tweaks you wish to make the next time you teach the class, that, if not written down, may be forgotten until you repeat the misstep. In a blog post for Inside Higher Ed, “Teach Like You Write,” Daniel Knorr describes his version of a teaching journal, which he does simply by annotating his syllabus during the semester. In this, he acknowledges the influence his students play in his planned revisions. He writes, “I wish my students could see how I will teach this course differently in the future because of their questions and insights. Remembering that this is the beginning of my teaching career and that my students’ learning does not stop when they leave my classroom has helped me focus on the ways I can best teach them now given our other responsibilities and limited time together.”

While it’s easy to use a teaching journal to track the minutiae of day-to-day—this lecture needs to be slower, this discussion fell flat—I admire Knorr’s approach for two reasons: First, he recognizes teaching as a collaborative act, one that our specific students take part in. This requires us to react in real time but also to consider how our students change over the years and decades. We all know that what worked in 2019 may no longer work in the same way. Second, I admire Knorr’s ability to zoom out. He reminds us to see teaching as a vocation we are cultivating: What do I hope students remember a year, five years, twenty years from now? What do I hope to retain and develop in my teaching practice a year, five years, twenty years from now?

Teaching, on a good day, is hard work. Some days that hard work feels deeply gratifying. On others, we may feel a desperation of our own, to get to the other side of the semester, to just be done. (Can’t that Giant Stack of Grading die already?) But we get through it. We always do. And these are the days—the joyous ones and the hardest ones—we ought to pay attention to. Note the tweaks you wish to make but don’t neglect recording the wins. This practice, a kind of gratitude, may help to sustain you.

When I first began sharing with students Brendan Kennelly’s poem “Begin,” this was done on instinct—it just felt right for the occasion. In time, I saw why: it reminds me that what I love best about teaching is the practice, the ability to revise. A teaching journal can help you plot the course.

(You can listen to Brendan Kennelly recite his poem, or, if you prefer, Hozier will read for you.)

Sources Consulted

Howells, Kerry. “The Role of Gratitude in Higher Education.” (2024 Jan). Higher Education Research and Development. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228909266_The_role_of_gratitude_in_higher_education

Kennelly, Brendan. “Begin.” (1999 Dec 1). Begin. Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

Knorr, Daniel, “Teach Like You Write.” (2018 Nov 8.) Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/teach-you-write

“Reflective Writing: Keeping a Teaching Journal.” (2024.) Resources for Teaching Assistants. Ohio University. Retrieved from https://www.ohio.edu/cas/about/assessment/teaching-assistant-resources/reflective-writing-keeping-teaching-journal

Richards, Jack C. and Farrell, Thomas S. C. (eds). (2005). “Keeping a teaching journal.” Professional Development for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press, pp. 68-84.

Revising—and Reframing—Your Teaching Philosophy

Article by Tara DaPra, Assistant Teaching Professor & 2022-23 Instructional Development Consultant

Why should you write a teaching philosophy? Chances are, you already have, even if it was way back in graduate school or when you applied for the job you now hold. But if you are going up for promotion, as many of us in the teaching professor category may now do, or if—happy days—someone nominates you for a teaching award, your teaching philosophy may need updating. You may be dreading this. You may continually move it to the end of a long list of more pressing tasks. You may ask yourself if anyone will really read this. Leonard Cassuto says what many of us are thinking when he writes, “Teaching philosophies account for some of the most tiresome reading that academe has to offer (and that’s saying something).” But must they be? Rather than a chore or a high-stakes assessment, why not re-frame what a teaching philosophy can—or perhaps should—be? What if you instead treated your teaching philosophy as a celebration of your time in the classroom and a vision for the future?

In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, James Lang argues that teaching philosophies “fall under the genre of creative nonfiction,” a genre of writing that privileges techniques like voice, narrative arc, and compelling details while insisting on a non-negotiable commitment to the truth. Lang warns writers of teaching philosophies not to fall into the default mode we so often see in student writing—telling rather than showing. So instead of regurgitating your course learning objectives or points from your CV, Lang advises that we zoom in and describe a day when those objectives were lived in a particularly meaningful way. He writes, “Readers remember and respond to your stories, not your explanations.”

Another hallmark of creative nonfiction is to distinguish between what the writer knows and does not know—and to lean in to the latter. In her essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl writes, “It still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.” Teaching philosophies are, essentially, a personal essay, a space for writers to puzzle over a complicated question and attempt to answer it from many angles. The word essay itself means “trial.” What, then, is the question you most want to discover, as it relates to your teaching? What parts of that question have you answered and what parts remain a mystery?

Writing a teaching philosophy can help us to reflect upon and articulate our ideas about what makes for effective teaching. And doing this can help to ensure that what we do in our classes is consistent with those beliefs—but it can also acknowledge pieces of the teaching puzzle that we have yet to fit together. And so, while teaching philosophies should certainly highlight a teacher’s strengths and successes, good teachers might also acknowledge what they hope to learn next.

If you’d like to read more about writing effective and reflective teaching philosophies, CATL has gathered some resources.

Exam Wrappers

An exam wrapper is a way for students to reflect on their experience on an exam. It is meant for learners to look again at the techniques they use to get ready for an exam, identify strategies they can use to prepare for later assessments, and consider how similar strategies might help them in their studies in and beyond your course.

Sometimes also called “exam debriefs,” these follow-up reflection activities are often called “exam wrappers” because they serve as a wrap-up for the work done on an exam. They’re also meant for students to further articulate context and relevance for what the exam covered—’wrapping’ some additional meaning around the work they’ve done.

Exam wrappers largely attempt to get at (and point students toward reflecting on) the following:

  • The amount of time and effort put into studying
  • Study habits used
  • Whether students engage with course objectives (especially to direct their studying)
  • Reasons students lose or believe they lose points (whether they missed foundational knowledge, made “silly mistakes,” environmental factors and distraction, etc.)
  • Possible interventions or adjustments

How you implement an exam wrapper is up to you. Some possible strategies include:

  • An exam wrapper counting for an improvement of one half letter grade (from BC to B, for example) on the exam.
  • Requiring students complete a wrapper to turn in alongside corrections for full or partial credit on missed questions.
  • Pairing an exam wrapper with instructor- or TA-led review sessions for later exams. Note: If you go this route, it’s still a good idea to have students complete the wrapper activity shortly after receiving feedback on the exam they’re reviewing so it and their study habits are fresh in their minds.
  • Offering the exam wrapper as ‘makeup’ work for one or more formative activities which led up to the exam.
  • Offering course-level extra credit.
  • Some combination of any or all of these!

As students complete the survey/worksheet, encourage them to think about their answers as they go. A few examples:

  • The question about techniques lists good techniques for studying. Could you adopt one or more of these?
  • There is a question about how you use the learning objectives in the course. You might not yet, but doing so is a good way to get to know why we are doing what we are in this course—including why exam questions are what they are.
  • You’re also asked why you think you lost points on the exam. For the more frequent reasons, what adjustments might you make to avoid these in the future? Do you need to study differently or maybe just slow down when taking the exam?

The last few questions in the examples provides below ask students to articulate responses to these sorts of reflections.

If you are interested in trying out an exam wrapper, we might recommend beginning with a basic Canvas Survey. We have a file you can download and import into a Canvas course to get you started.

If you’re looking for something a little more robust or want to do more with the data, you can take a look at an Example Exam Wrapper Assignment using Qualtrics here. If you’d like a copy of the survey used in this example, you can download this Exam_Wrapper QSF File (Click to Download) and import it into your Qualtrics account (click for instructions). (Note: you do not want to re-use the link in the sample assignment since you will not be able to access the data/results.) The same assignment is available here in Word document format (Click to Download) if you prefer. The Canvas Survey version above is also very similar.

Additional examples of exam wrappers for various disciplines can be found on Carnegie Mellon University’s Eberly Center page on Exam Wrappers.

For further reading, see:

  • Badir, A. et al. 2018. “Exam Wrappers, Reflection, and Student Performance in Engineering Mechanics.” 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Salt Lake City, Utah. https://peer.asee.org/30462
  • Gizem Gezer-Templeton, et al. 2017. “Use of Exam Wrappers to Enhance Students’ Metacognitive Skills in a Large Introductory Food Science and Human Nutrition Course.” Research in Food Science Education 16(1): 28-36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1541-4329.12103
  • Pate, A. et al. 2019. “The use of exam wrappers to promote metacognition.” Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning 11(5): 492-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cptl.2019.02.008