1 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In this course, we define SoTL as:

systematic and ethically reasoned investigation of aspects of teaching and student learning by applying disciplinary knowledge, resulting in reflections and outcomes that are publicly shared for peer-review and for others to build upon.

SoTL involves educators moving beyond reflection upon their teaching strategies to an intentional, rigorous and systematic inquiry to investigate teaching practices and pedagogical strategies for student learning and engagement.

Educators often employ a disciplinary lens (theoretical and methodological) when conducting SoTL research on the efficacy of student learning. A SoTL inquiry is, therefore, theoretically grounded and methodologically diverse and involves educators reconsidering their long-held pedagogical theories and practices within the context that they are investigating.

When disseminating, SoTL researchers provide rich details about the context of their inquiry for peer-review and to enhance the likelihood that other researchers can build upon or expand their research and pedagogical knowledge (Gayle, 2018).

SoTL practice may influence career development, promotion and the recognition of teaching excellence (Fanghanel et al., 2015).

Shulman (2002) refers to SoTL as ‘a concept of moral action, aimed at cultural change’ (p. vii). Shulman also calls SoTL the ‘pedagogical imperative’: ‘an educator can teach with integrity only if an effort is made to examine the impact of his or her work on the students’. There is an obligation on individual educators, institutions and even on disciplinary communities to systematically engage in critical questioning via/in SoTL on academic and institutional policies and practices that have an impact on students’ learning (Gilpin, 2011).

With SoTL’s focus on student learning, either directly on student learners or indirectly on student learning by looking at academic practice of educators, McKinney et al. (2019) have taken a broad perspective to SoTL and define SoTL as: ‘systematic reflection and/or study of teaching and learning made public’.

This definition is intended to:

• encourage and support SoTL across disciplinary boundaries
• be inclusive of partnerships in SoTL research; for example, educators, learning designers, content creators, data analysts, tutors, educational researchers and students
• emphasise that SoTL investigations are on a continuum from reflections on academic practice in an individual classroom or involving a small group of students to formal investigations at departmental or institutional levels, and from local and informal to international and traditional ways of making SoTL public.

SoTL research is distinct from educational research. Educational research is conducted by scholars whose discipline is education and tends to rely on more traditional education or social science research methods, often quantitative. SoTL is a practitioner type of research where teachers want ‘to deepen their understanding of their teaching practices and to improve the quality of their student learning’ (Stierer and Antoniou, 2004, p. 275). SoTL, unlike educational research, embraces diverse approaches to conducting reflection and research on teaching and learning, including situating the inquiry in one or more disciplines, and builds a cross-disciplinary evidence base for effective learning and teaching practices.

Activity 1 What are the key characteristics of SoTL?

Timing: Allow approximately 10 minutes

Watch the following Center for Engaged Learning video from start to 04:14, and consider the question: What are the characteristics of SoTL that the five speakers have touched upon?

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Transcript: Video 1 Key characteristics of SoTL

RANDY BASS:

The most basic definition of the scholarship of teaching and learning that I use is that it is a faculty undertaking systematic inquiry of learning in his or her own classroom. Every time a professor or a teacher teaches a course, they’re engaged in an experiment. The syllabus is a hypothesis that if I teach the class this way, if I teach this material in this order, and if students do these things, then I hypothesize that something will happen. Students will learn. They’ll grow. They’ll benefit. And that’s how we play out every single time we teach.

What’s missing is that final step of what an experimental mode would be, which is this is my hypothesis. This is the unfolding. And now, I have to look very closely at the results and reexamine my hypothesis. So that loop closing happens always in some informal way. That didn’t work. I’ll never do that again. That was great. I’m always good on that day. Students love this.

But we often don’t undertake that loop in a very systematic way. So for me, the scholarship of teaching and learning is about taking that last step in the hypothesis testing that every act of teaching is and picking some dimension, looking at it systematically, looking sensitively and rigorously at the evidence of student learning, and asking if the assumptions that are going into this learning design are correct and if there are things that I might do differently.

JOANNA RENC-ROE:

The key characteristic of SoTL work for me is that it’s a form of inquiry. Some people like the term research. Some people prefer inquiry. It is certainly based on notions of reflective practice and reflecting on your teaching. That’s the starting point. For me personally, SoTL involves not just an inquiry into your teaching practices, but it has to have a focus on students’ learning. So student learning is the actual focus of inquiry in SoTL. That’s my personal understanding of it.

PAT HUTCHINGS:

A definition that I like is sort of as follows. It’s faculty bringing their habits and skills as scholars to their work as teachers. So habits of asking questions, gathering evidence of all different kinds, drawing conclusions or raising new questions, and bringing what they learn through that to the thing they were looking to add at the first place, which is students learning. And their own teaching, of course. So it’s a kind of cycle. But it’s essentially behaving as they do as a scholar in other settings and bringing that to their work as teachers.

BARBARA GAYLE:

The key characteristics of SoTL really are bringing your research to your teaching in a systematic way. So that what you plan to do for your students, you carry out, and you test. And you figure out exactly their response and what might make their learning better. So it’s about really addressing your teaching with the research knowledge that you have.

DAN BERNSTEIN:

The root metaphor of scholarship of teaching and learning is inquiry. And that’s what differentiates that kind of teaching from regular teaching, is that you are continually asking a question. It doesn’t have to be a cosmic question about whether education in some theoretical ways is working as a model. But it’s more a question that could be related simply to our students achieving what I hoped for or what they hoped for. And so the central feature is that you’re asking a question.

What that means is that when you’re doing scholarship of teaching and learning, you’re looking for an answer. And that brings into play a second key idea, which is that it involves evidence. Some scholarship of teaching and learning work is purely conceptual. But much of it is asking a question, observing something to see if you can find an answer to that question. And then framing what you learned from it.

MARY TAYLOR HUBER

The key characteristics of SoTL have probably changed over the past 20 years since the term entered the vocabulary in higher education. To me, the key element is for faculty and those who are working with them to look closely and critically at student learning. But in fact, you can elaborate that because it involves what you do with that knowledge.

First of all, to look closely and critically, it helps to have a really good question. So having a question would be the first step. And it’s typically the way in which people enter the scholarship of teaching and learning, by thinking about something that troubles them in their classroom or something that pleases them, something they’d like to know better. So it’s developing that sense of inquiry in what you do in the classroom, or, as we’ll probably talk a little later about in your program, or some larger unit in which you’re a part.

So asking that question is very important, and then you get to devising ways of answering that question. How do you go about answering that question? That is one where it’s very helpful to have- colleagues to work with and think about. Sometimes, you can answer your question just by a careful look at the student work for your class, but sometimes, you have to be thinking about your question before you even devise and design your assignments in your class so that you’ll have work that will more readily answer it.

Many people go further than that, and they look at- they do some other things, too. They’ll interview students- they’ll do surveys, they’ll do other things. And it kind of depends what you ask and what you want to know and what you’re comfortable with methodologically, frequently taking comfort in the procedures you’re familiar with and from your own discipline.

So there you have a question, you have a way of going about answering it. And for some people, the most important part is what you do with that information. And that is where you redesign, reboot your course or assignment, an assessment, or even a whole program based on many things that you’re learning about, what your students are thinking and what they’re doing. And for some people, the really critical piece after that is going public with what you’re learning.

We try to think of going public, frequently, in programs for the scholarship of teaching and learning with a wide range of speaking with your colleagues about it at the most informal level all the way up to publishing papers or books as a result of a whole program of work. But people shouldn’t start the scholarship of teaching and learning with that as their only idea about what it means to go public. There are many ways in between that are fruitful and that help move the discussion about teaching and learning forward.

GARY POOLE

Key characteristics of SoTL work I think focus, in some part, anyway, not just on the nature of the work, but who is doing the work. I’ve been asked a few times about the difference between educational research, which we have been doing for centuries, and SoTL, which appears to be a relatively new thing on the landscape.

My answer is it’s not so much about necessarily the research questions, or even some of the methods, but it is about who, who’s doing the work. And when SoTL is going well, the number of people doing the work is greatly expanded, the range of people, the diversity of people is greatly expanded. And what that’s supposed to do is increase the impact of the work because more of it is being conducted, as we might say, at the coalface.

NANCY CHICK

I think the key characteristics for SoTL work begin with asking interesting questions. And those interesting questions, typically, but not always, come from a challenge that someone is having with their teaching or with their students’ learning or the interface between the two. So I think asking those interesting questions begins with the characteristics of good SoTL work, and then working out a methodology, a way of gathering answers to the question; the evidence from the students, the teacher’s reflections, all the relevant evidence, finding a design and methodology that not only reflects the nature of the question, but in many ways, sometimes more importantly, the nature of the expertise of the researcher or researchers.

Now, I know that’s a slightly contested response because some people say that the research design and methodology should come specifically from the question, and the question alone. But to avoid what some have called amateur work in SoTL, I think we have to bring our expertise to the table. And I think there’s plenty of room in SoTL for a variety of ways to answer questions. And so I think a methodology grounded in- a methodology for answering questions grounded in the question and the researcher’s expertise.

And then finally, I think a key characteristic would be going public in some way, sharing the findings, whether they’re positive or negative findings, whether I found that my students learned greatly or revealed many misconceptions that made me have to go back to the starting point. Whatever those findings are, sharing them publicly, beyond just one’s institution, to a larger audience to build knowledge on whatever the question is, because chances are many people have asked the same question or wondered the same thing or dealt with the same challenge, but to build on that conversation, to build that knowledge, to continue the conversation, and to enter that kind of broader audience beyond one’s institution.

So for me, those three characteristics are essential for SoTL; beginning with an interesting question, having a methodology that’s grounded in the question and the researcher’s expertise, and then going public in some broad way.

TONY CICCONE

I think of SoTL in four ways. It’s a perspective on teaching and learning, it’s a set of practices that we use to investigate teaching and learning, it’s a product that comes about from that investigation, and it’s also something that has an impact. So I would start by saying that the most important part of SoTL work, for me, is the fact that it’s a perspective. It says that teaching and learning are areas where we can ask intelligent, consequential questions. If we start there, I don’t think we can go very far wrong.

SHERRY LINKON

When you’re doing it yourself, two things happen. One is that you get to look at the questions that you really care about. So I’m often looking, when I’m reading people’s articles, at whether what they’re talking about is useful to me. Can I apply it? Can I adapt it? Can it inform my teaching? But when I’m asking my own questions, it’s a much more direct process.

The other thing that happens when you do your own is that you have to think much more carefully about what do I think student learning looks like, because you have to define it. You have to look at the work that somebody did and say, yeah, that’s what learning looks like, right there. And that process, I think, makes me a better teacher in ways that reading other people’s articles doesn’t, because it gets me closer to it.

End transcript: Video 1 Key characteristics of SoTL

Video 1 Key characteristics of SoTL

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Key Characteristics of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] video by Center for Engaged Learning, Elon University, https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by-nc-nd/ 4.0/

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Discussion

SoTL is a systematic, rigorous and reflective approach that enquires about student learning; one or more research questions guide the way the research is designed and conducted in a cyclical manner to collect evidence, draw conclusions to answer the questions and to ask new questions.