Two Examples of “Statement of Goals”
Excerpt from a grant proposal for a project in which two professors will collaborate in the evaluation, redesign, and peer observation of teaching in their foundational courses that they teach on a regular basis.
“Please find this narrative now specified more succinctly into goals, of which we are the subjects of each one, with their various collaborating partners specified. We will each for our own course (and in consultation with the other foundations teacher/peer mentor) accomplish the following:
Devise an integrated pedagogy for a foundational course, one which is accountable for content, attentive to student diversity, and open to critical assessment; our general consultant will work with each and both of us to assist us in this basic step.
- Develop a more nuanced means of course evaluation for that revised course, one that assesses transmission of content, spiritual and community formation, and skills development in pedagogies appropriate and effective for the distinctive characteristics of our students; our pedagogical consultant will work with us here;
- Create an increased sensibility, on the part of both students and instructors, to the manners in which different people learn;
- Train and mentor a doctoral student teaching assistant who will function as both a teaching and research assistant;
- Disseminate our learning results with those who read the journals Teaching Theology and Religion or Theological Education, with graduate students and colleagues, and specifically with the faculties of our schools in the appropriate forums as indicated above.”
Excerpt from a grant proposal for a project to strengthen teaching through workshops, reflections, and other departmental and individual projects, during a time of major faculty turnover and transition in the department.
- Strengthen a departmental culture of reflection by engaging in sustained, critical, collaborative reflection about practices of teaching and the profession.
- Build a community of teachers/scholars in a situation of rapid personnel turnover.
- Assist new faculty to negotiate the multiple transitions into the profession by providing opportunities for sustained discussion of teaching, scholarship, institutional service, and personal and professional identity.
- Support new faculty to develop in the scholarship of teaching and of their disciplines.
- Orient new faculty to negotiate the transition into retirement within three years by providing opportunities for them to share their wisdom around teaching practice with new faculty, and to begin to identify ways to envision their sense of vocation as teachers of religion in retirement.
- Compose a handbook describing the model for cultivating departmental reflection on teaching and the profession that will be a resource for departments negotiating rapid personnel changes at both ends of the career span.