The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) involves systematic research on teaching and learning issues. It typically involves instructors investigating teaching/learning issues within their own classrooms. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research assumes:
Hence, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is more than just "scholarly teaching." Scholarly teachers keep up on the literature and research in their fields and learn about recent pedagogical advances. Scholarly teachers foster learning by getting feedback from students, by asking their peers to visit their classrooms and provide them with constructive criticism, by developing innovative curriculum materials, and by attending faculty development workshops. Clearly, scholarly teaching is vital to student learning. But the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning goes one step beyond scholarly teaching. As Pat Hutchings and Lee Shulman point out in an article in the September/October 1999 issue of Change Magazine,
"the scholarship of teaching and learning requires a kind of "going meta," in which faculty frame and systematically 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."
Hence the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning requires a "research" component that is typically not part of the definition of scholarly or effective teaching. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning asks teachers to question and investigate their students' learning, to submit their findings to peer review, and to make those results public so that others can learn from, and build upon, them.
Although many of us are great teachers, we often do not understand "why" something works or doesn't work in our classrooms. Much teaching is still "trial and error." This may be especially true when we think about teaching and learning practices online. Why might a teaching practice be effective for promoting learning in a traditional face-to-face classroom, but fail miserably in the online instructional environment? Are there core differences between the traditional face-to-face classroom and the online classroom that necessitate unique teaching practices? Are there universal instructional practices that translate across both environments and produce the same learning outcomes? These are all important teaching/learning questions that, if answered, would improve the practice of teaching in online classes. However, unless we systematically investigate these questions, we only have our own experiences, hunches, intuition, or “trial and error” to use as evidence when designing online learning experiences for our students. Without systematic investigation, we have little data for determining what works, what fails, and what still needs to be tried.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning offers all instructors a unique opportunity to learn more about their teaching and their students' learning. If we ever hope to be able to discuss the "science" of teaching and learning, instead of just the "art" of teaching and learning, we need to do systematic research on teaching/learning issues that can be replicated, utilized by practitioners, and developed into theoretical frameworks. Similar to the medical field where systematic investigatory work has replaced the advice of medicine men/women and resulted in a much greater understanding of diseases, their causes, and effective remedies, so too systematic inquiry into teaching/learning issues should result in a much greater understanding of teaching/learning problems, their causes, and effective solutions. Although it is true that many of us teach by emulating those we consider to be outstanding teachers (and in fact, this method can work well for some of us), it is also true that emulation does not answer the question of "why" this teacher was outstanding. Moreover, it is only in knowing more specifically, and systematically, what teaching practices result in improved student learning, that we can ever construct a baseline for "teaching the teacher." We need systematic research that (a) allows us to draw concrete conclusions about why certain teaching practices contribute to student learning (and conversely, why others fail in this realm), and (b) provides a basis for building theory and practical knowledge about teaching/learning practices.
Research into teaching and learning issues is no different than research on any other topic, and is no different in an online classroom than in a traditional classroom. As with any investigative project, the following steps are necessary:
To do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the online teaching environment, you can follow this framework to ask and investigate questions that involve student learning in the online classroom. To determine relevant questions to ask, you might consider the following prompts:
Investigating any of these questions, and/or any other teaching/learning questions in the online environment can only help improve teaching in these classrooms.
Best practices for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning include:
The following guideline questions are useful when considering whether you want to engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:
If you answered “yes” to even one of these questions, then you are probably a good candidate for engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. There are many useful sources for learning more about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and for reading about some of the best practices in this arena.
The UWS Leadership Site for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Web Resource Center (www.sotl.uwm.edu) has a listing of over 500 publications on this topic. Some of these publications are also available online at this site.
Select sources that you might want to read (especially if you are new to this topic) that address best practices, techniques, or guidelines include:
Bass, R. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: What’s the problem? Inventio, 1(1), 1-9. Available at: http://www.doit.gmu.edu/Archives/feb98/rbass.htm
Bernstein, D., & Bass. R. (2005). The scholarship of teaching and learning. Academe, 91 (4). Available at: http://www.aaup.org/publications/academe/2005/05ja/05jabass.htm
Huber, M. T., & Morreale, S. P. (Eds.) (2002). Disciplinary styles in the scholarship of teaching and learning: Exploring common ground. Menlo Park, CA: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the American Association for Higher Education.
Hutchings, P. (Ed.) (2000). Opening lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Menlo Park, CA: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Shulman, L. (1999). Taking learning seriously. Change, July/August, 11-17.
The best advice if you are interested in systematically investigating your teaching practices and your students’ learning outcomes is to do some reading in this area (maybe access some of the readings listed above, and the UWS Web Resource Center) so that you have a foundation and/or context for this work. If you are still interested after completing this task, begin by asking a simple teaching/learning question that pertains to your online class, and that can be investigated within the confines of that classroom in a given semester. Design an investigation of that question, gather data from the students, analyze the data, and draw conclusions. Reflect on what you have learned from doing this study and incorporate that into your teaching practices. If at all possible, write up your results, and make them public in some way, so that others can also benefit from what you have learned.
Sometimes this work is better accomplished in collaboration with another instructor. If you know of someone who is already doing this type of work, or is interested in learning how to do it, you might consider teaming up with this person. Together you can design and implement the investigation, and then reflect on your results. There are many resources available in the UW system for conducting this work. Currently, many of the UW System campuses have a teaching/learning center where faculty developers are trained in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning best practices. You can access some of these via websites (available on the UWS Leadership Site Web Resource Center—see URL above). There are also conference and workshops available for people interested in this work (again available in the National Resources section of the UWS Leadership Site Web Resource Center).
Dr. Renee A. Meyers is the Coordinator of the University of Wisconsin System Leadership Site for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and also is a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.