The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

by Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, VanderbiltCenter for Teaching

  • What Is SoTL?
  • Teaching as a Form of Scholarship
  • Teaching as Community Property
  • A Focus on Student Learning
  • A Focus on Evidence of Student Learning
  • Examples of SoTL
  • Sample Projects
  • Gallerys of Projects
  • How is SoTL Done?
  • General Resources
  • Generating Questions about Student Learning
  • Qualitative Methods
  • Quantitative Methods
  • Going Public with SoTL
  • Publishing in Journals
  • Going Public Online
  • Conferences
  • SoTL Initiatives
  • National Initiatives
  • Campus Initiatives
  • Bibliography
  • Exploring the Literature
  • Articles
  • Books
  • SoTL at Vanderbilt

What Is SoTL?

A consensus has formed within growing circles in academia that there is scholarly research to be done on teaching and learning, that the systematic creation of rigorous knowledge about teaching and learning is a crucial prerequisite to responding to major challenges facing academia, that this knowledge must be shared publicly and should build cumulatively over time, and that the explorations of this area should be conducted by academics from all disciplines, not just those with appointments in schools of education.

The above quote from David Pace in his article "The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" (American Historical Review, 109:2, October 2004) provides reasons for valuing an approach to teaching commonly called the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). SoTL involves

  • asking questions about student learning and the teaching activities designed to promote student learning in an effort, at least in part, to improve one's own teaching practice,
  • answering those questions by systematically analyzing evidence of student learning, and
  • sharing the results of that analysis publicly in order to invite review and to contribute to the body of knowledge on student learning in a variety of contexts.

This essay provides some history of the term "scholarship of teaching and learning" and explores key elements of this approach to teaching.

Teaching as a Form of Scholarship

In an effort to define the scholarship performed by professors in academia as more than just "teaching versus research," Ernest L. Boyer, in his influential book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1990), concluded that "the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching." This conceptualization of scholarship elevates the traditional role of teaching from "a routine function, tacked on" to an essential component of a professor's scholarly life. Furthermore, Boyer argued that the academy should recognize and reward all four components of scholarship, including the scholarship of teaching.

Building on Boyer's work, Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I. Maeroff, in their book Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1997), identified six standards against which all scholarly work, including the scholarship of teaching, should be evaluated.Scholarly work should have

  1. Clear goals
  2. Adequate preparation
  3. Appropriate methods
  4. Significant results
  5. Effective presentation
  6. Reflective critique

These goals were chosen to be familiar to faculty members in the context of evaluating the scholarship of discovery (what is traditionally called "research") yet applicable to evaluating the other three types of scholarly work. Thus, by one definition, the scholarship of teaching is teaching that is done in ways that meet these six goals.

Teaching as Community Property

Shortly thereafter, Lee S. Shulman wrote an article titled "Taking Learning Seriously" (Change, 31:4, July/August 1999) in which he presented the following alternate definition of scholarship.

An act of intelligence or of artistic creation becomes scholarship when it possesses at least three attributes: it becomes public; it becomes an object of critical review and evaluation by members of one's community; and members of one's community begin to use, build upon, and develop those acts of mind and creation.

Shulman argued that in order to take learning seriously as a priority of academia, a scholarship of teaching should be emphasized that meets these three qualities. Shulman's definition of scholarship emphasized the aspects of scholarly work that are done in a community of scholars—an emphasis not present in the definition presented by Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff.The scholarship of teaching, in Shulman's view, presents teaching as "community property" in ways similar to those in which research is viewed as community property.

A Focus on Student Learning

In a following article, "The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments" (Change, 31:5, September/October 1999), Shulman and his co-author Pat Hutchings explained why the idea of a "scholarship of teaching" transformed into a "scholarship of teaching and learning." They wrote that the scholarship of teaching "requires a kind of 'going meta,' in which faculty frame and systemically investigate questions related to student learning—the conditions under which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth—and do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it." Thus, SoTL is not only done publicly to invite critical review and exchange of ideas but also with an emphasis on inquiry into student learning.

In the introduction to Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Carnegie Foundation, 2000), Hutchings presented the following taxonomy of questions in an effort to categorize ways in which faculty members can accomplish this inquiry into student learning.

  • "What works?" – These are questions that seek "evidence about the relative effectiveness of different [teaching] approaches."
  • "What is?" – These are questions that seek to describe, but not evaluate the effectiveness of, different teaching approaches. These are also questions that seek to describe how students learn.
  • "Visions of the possible" – These are questions related to goals for teaching and learning that have yet to be met or are new to the faculty member asking the questions.
  • "Theory building" questions – These are questions designed to build theoretical frameworks for SoTL similar to frameworks used in other disciplines.

A Focus on Evidence of Student Learning

The ways in which these questions are asked and in which teaching is made community property, available for critique and being built upon, vary among faculty who engage in SoTL.In the Peer Review of Teaching Project, faculty members develop course portfolios in which learning goals, teaching activities and methods, and evidence of student learning are documented and reflected upon by the faculty member teaching the course and his or her peers. Dan Bernstein, former director of the project, wrote in the article "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" (Academe, 91:4, July/August 2005), "Sustained inquiry into student learning across semesters that is made widely available in an electronic course portfolio is a high form of scholarship in its own right."

In the same article, Randy Bass, director of the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP), described the SoTL projects initiated by the participants in VKP. Their central questions were "How did they know that their students were learning?" and "Did the students' learning promise to last?" He writes, "By asking these questions, many faculty discovered early on that what most interested—or eluded—them about their student's learning could not be answered simply by looking at regularly assigned course work."Thus VKP makes central the idea of making student learning more visible by collecting evidence of that learning in a variety of forms, some of which are not traditionally used to assess student learning.

Leaders of the Delta Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that the term "scholarship of teaching and learning" had less meaning than the term "teaching-as-research" for the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty and students with whom they work. They present teaching-as-research as having the following nine components.

  1. Informed by the work of others
  2. Includes an explicit question or hypothesis about teaching-learning relationships
  3. Shaped by an explicit design or plan for addressing the question at hand
  4. Collecting credible data as evidence
  5. Analyzing evidence and drawing conclusions
  6. Reflecting and taking action
  7. Cyclical and ongoing
  8. Results are documented and disseminated
  9. The practitioner is principally responsible for the inquiry plan and process

Each of these projects places an emphasis on collecting and analyzing evidence of student learning.While a teacher's personal reflections and the reflections of his or her peers and students are helpful in answering questions about student learning, SoTL involves more than reflections—it involves evidence of student learning.

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