CFT Focuses on SoTL This Spring
Join us next week for What is SoTL, the first event (of three this spring) focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning.
In this first discussion, What is SoTL, CFT Assistant Director Nancy Chick along with a handful of Vanderbilt faculty and graduate students, will help you explore how you might adopt a SoTL perspective and ask meaningful questions about your teaching and your students’ learning in ways that align with your disciplinary research practices. The group of featured “SoTL’ers”, who have varying levels of involvement with SoTL, will share their experiences and answer questions about their work. They include:
- Julia Phillippi is an Assistant Professor of Nurse-Midwifery and has published the results of one collaborative project with Mavis Schorn and is currently working on several others.
- Lily Claiborne is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and an Academic Adviser in the College of Arts and Sciences Pre-major Academic Advising Center. She was a Teaching As Research Fellow, as well as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the CFT.
- Steve Buckles is a Senior Lecturer in Economics and is an experienced SoTL’er.
- Jenna Gorlewicz is a graduate student in the Medical and Electromechanical Design Lab. She was a Teaching As Research Fellow and completed a SoTL project as part of the Teaching Certificate Program.
- Kate Pride-Brown is a graduate student in Sociology and is currently working on her SoTL project as part of the Teaching Certificate Program.
- Nancy Chick is an Assistant Director at the Center for Teaching and a Senior Lecturer in English. She has completed a dozen or so SoTL projects, has published and presented most of them, and is on the Board of Directors for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL).
Come with your questions, your own experiences, or just your curiosity. This discussion will take place on Thursday, February 16, 4:10-5:30. Registration is available for this event.
In part two of the SoTL series of events, Assessing Student Learning Teaching Workshop, Nancy will share strategies to better understand what and how your students are learning—or not learning. Assessments can reveal misconceptions, help students assess their own learning, save time in your teaching, and collect evidence to document an effective classroom. Such assessment techniques will help make visible students’ thinking and learning, including the significant and often rich moments in the learning process that occur before the final products of exams and essays. These strategies can be used for formative or summative assessments and for documenting student learning in applications, dossiers, and scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects. This workshop will take place on Tuesday, March 20, 4:10-5:30. You can register for this event.
In the third part, the SoTL Symposium, join participants in Cycle 3 of the Teaching Certificate Program as they share and discuss their recent SoTL projects. Many of these projects were carried out here at Vanderbilt, so these participants will be able to share their unique perspective regarding designing and implementing a project and overcoming barriers to SoTL work. This event will take place on Thursday, April 12, 4:00-5:30.
Additionally, coming soon to the CFT website is a SoTL Spotlight, a regular feature by new CFT Assistant Director Nancy Chick focusing on the scholarship of teaching and learning and how it’s happening at Vanderbilt. SoTL promotes teaching as a scholarly endeavor with the goal to not only improve teaching and learning but to also create a community of scholars here at Vanderbilt who add to the body of knowledge about both.
Additionally, the CFT offers many resources and examples of SoTL work in the SoTL Teaching Guide.
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