CFT Offers New Guide: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

Posted by Rhett Mcdaniel on Tuesday, September 24, 2013 in News, Resource.

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL, pronounced “sō-tul” in the US) is a synthesis of teaching, learning, and research in higher education that aims to bring a scholarly lens—the curiosity, the inquiry, the rigor, the disciplinary variety—to what happens in the classroom (brick-and-mortar, virtual, co-curricular, et al.).   SoTL involves

• asking meaningful questions about student learning and about the teaching activities designed to facilitate student learning,
• answering those questions by first making relevant student learning visible as evidence of thinking and learning (or mis-learning), and then systematically analyzing this evidence, and
• sharing the results of that analysis publicly to invite review and to contribute to the body of knowledge on student learning in a variety of contexts, and
• aiming to improve student learning by strengthening the practice of teaching (one’s own and others’).

This new guide, from CFT Assistant Director Nancy Chick, offers two layers:

• On easily navigable web pages, you’ll find a brief introduction first to an understanding of SoTL and then to the process of doing SoTL, and
• in PDFs linked throughout the “Doing SoTL” web pages, you’ll find a tutorial of the basics of designing a SoTL project.

Visit the SoTL Guide.

Tags: scholarship of teaching and learning, SoTL, Teaching Guide