job - How to write a teaching statement without any classroom teaching experience?

I have a friend who is applying for teaching positions in biochemistry with no teaching experience. She has a strong research background, with several publications as a grad student and post doc, but is interested in transitioning into teaching (partially to gain employment and solve a two body problem, but also out of genuine interest). The position she is applying for asks for a "Statement of teaching interest". While, I think I can give good advice for someone who has taught before, what should someone write about if they have never taught or TAed a class. She does have some background tutoring and showing faculty, grad students, and undergrads how to use various machines in the lab. But that is about it. So

(1) What is a "statement of teaching interest?" How does it differ from a "teaching philosophy" or a "teaching statement"?

and

(2) How does one write this statement without any classroom teaching experience?

Answer

About your first question, I don't really know if there is a difference, or if those are just different terms referring to the same document.

In context of a training program done at my university, one of our assignments was to write a personal teaching statement. We had several inputs to help us in doing this task, and one I found particularly useful was the following list of questions (credit to the Staff Development Unit of Newcastle University):

1. What Higher Education is for: what are students supposed to learn or how are they supposed to develop whilst studying?



2. How do you think students learn in your discipline, or in aspects of it? (You may of course be part of an inter-disciplinary area)


3. So, based on (1.) and (2.) what teaching methods do you use that reflect this position (with examples)?


4. What has informed your thinking here (experience, literature, colleagues, students)?

You can note that 1, 2 and 4 do not require strictly speaking to have teaching experience (although it's clearly helpful). For the point 3, you can replace the "do you use" by "could you use", and that should work.

Two aspects of this assignment that were really important for us were to use pedagogy literature (as Dave Clarke pointed out) and to be reflective. Of course, such an assignment is not necessarily evaluated as would be a teaching statement by a recruiting committee, but I think the point was that, as a young academic, you cannot really be expected to be an expert in teaching. But you are expected to learn how to become one, and to reflect on your past experiences, interactions, discussions, etc, in order to improve your practice.