Reflections from SoTL Scholar Abbey Mann
“Scholarly teaching is what every one of us should be engaged in every day that we are in classroom, in our office with students, tutoring, lecturing, conducting discussions, all the roles we play pedagogically. Our work as teachers should meet the highest scholarly standards of groundedness, of openness, of clarity and complexity. But it is only when we step back and reflect systematically on the teaching we have done, in a form that can be publicly reviewed and built upon by our peers, that we have moved from scholarly teaching to the scholarship of teaching.” -Lee Shulman, 2004
SoTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning) is an academic movement in which an instructor investigates student learning with a scholarly question in mind about “what works” or “what is” (what it looks like) in the classroom. The challenge, as posited by Shulman (above), is moving towards SoTL , not just scholarly teaching. SoTL investigates how we foster student learning through our teaching approaches by asking good questions and gathering evidence from students about their learning, our teaching practices, and often discipline-specific challenges. Then, we share our findings with the greater academic community. In this way, SoTL is a collection of evidence-based conversations about teaching and learning. Read reflections from Abbey Mann (Human & Organizational Development) below:
“SoTL gave me the opportunity to systematically examine an element of my teaching practice and reflect on this process and its outcomes with peers engaged in a similar practice.
There were so many beneficial pieces to participating in SoTL including the support for this research by others who value critically examining and improving pedagogy, having protected time to work on this project (both in SoTL meetings and in preparation for them), and connecting to a network of peers with similar interests.” — Abbey Mann
The CFT invites applications for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Scholars Program for the 2014-15 academic year. Deadline for applications is Monday, August 25th. For more information and to apply, visit the SoTL Scholars Program web page.
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