What is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (often abbreviated as SoTL) at its core is the practice of implementing evidence-based teaching practices in your course, exploring the impact by collecting results, and sharing the stories of lessons learned. Similar practices are sometimes labeled as Discipline-Based Education Research, or DBER.
Why Add Scholarship to Your Teaching Practice?
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) offers instructors of all career stages and disciplines an opportunity to reinvigorate your teaching and develop inquiry methods that can reveal how best to support student learning. Reasons why you might want to integrate scholarly teaching in to your classroom include:
- Improve your own teaching
- Share your ideas and successes with colleagues
- Disseminate findings through formal publications
- Career advancement
How to Get Started in SoTL?
Observe
Use your own teaching to inspire a question– perhaps a puzzling experience happened in your class or a teaching challenge caught you by surprise. One way to frame your SoTL questions is to consider three categories (Dewar et al., 2018):
- What is?
- What works? and
- What could be?
“What is” questions are descriptive and the scholar is seeking to describe a puzzling phenomenon. “What works” questions are testing a hypothesis or intervention and/or investigating a mechanism that supports learning. “What could be” questions ask about how teaching and learning might be structured in new ways.
Connect
Please reach out for a consultation so we can learn how to support your SoTL endeavors. Request a consultation today.
Connect with your colleagues:
- Join the Engineering4All community of practice
- Participate in a Reading Group
- Attend UW-Madison’s Teaching & Learning Symposium
- Attend a teaching conference:
- American Society of Engineering Education Conferences
- Kennesaw State SoTL Summit (Virtual Conference)
Explore
Seek inspiration from existing resources:
- International Handbook of Engineering Education Research
- How People Learn
- Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC)
- Advances in Engineering Education (AEE)
- International Journal of Engineering Education
- Journal of Engineering Education
We’re also happy to connect you with additional resources!
