LINKS

Collaboration Resources for
College and University Teachers

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

What Are the Hallmarks of “Scholarship”?

Lee Shulman (President Emeritus of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) argues that an activity must manifest at least three characteristics if it is to be designated as scholarship: It should be made public, peer-reviewed, and made available for exchange of and use by other members of one’s scholarly community (cited in Atkinson, 2001).

• It’s “made public.” Both the Carnegie Foundation, through its CASTL program, and AAHE’s Teaching Initiative have sought to help make teaching public and, hence, open for peer review. In Making Teaching Community Property (1996), Pat Hutchings provides several examples of ways in which teaching can be made public and collaboration promoted—including teaching circles, reciprocal classroom observations, mentoring, teaching portfolios, team teaching, and pedagogical scholarship. Teaching portfolios have increasingly become important documents for promotion and tenure review, both to help demonstrate effective teaching and to present evidence of SoTL. An early (but still important) work on teaching portfolios came out of AAHE’s Teaching Initiative in 1991—The Teaching Portfolio: Capturing the Scholarship in Teaching. Also useful are various campus Web sites that showcase effective documentation of SoTL work, e.g. University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Peer Review of Teaching Project and Georgetown University’s Visible Knowledge Project.
   
• It’s assessed by appropriate peers. Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff’s Scholarship Assessed (1997) offers six qualitative standards by which all scholarship—including SoTL—might be assessed. More recently, in Faculty Priorities Reconsidered, O’Meara and Rice (2005) offer a guide to best practices for those campuses that want to encourage multiple forms of scholarship. Paulsen and Feldman (2006) participate in the crucial conversation about assessment of SoTL by suggesting multiple reasons for connecting scholarship and teaching/learning. These purposes lead to varying results, each of which ought to be assessed differently. An additional question in SoTL assessment is this: Who are the relevant peers who should be assessing SoTL—are they disciplinary colleagues, Experts in teaching/learning theory and research, students? Hutchings' Ethics of Inquiry: Issues in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2002) addresses this question and others.
   
• It’s made available to others who can build on this work. In addition to course portfolios—some of which increasing numbers of faculty are posting online so that this work can be disseminated beyond their own campus—several peer-reviewed journals that publish various forms of SoTL are gaining exposure and credibility. Some SoTL consists largely of reflections on one’s own teaching and philosophy, other SoTL consists of research applying learning theory to a challenge faced in one’s teaching. Kathleen McKinney’s Enhancing Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2007) provides a thorough and helpful overview of many issues in SoTL. Maryellen Weimer’s Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning (2006) analyzes the various types of literature on teaching and learning. Both works also include numerous resources for publication of SoTL.

SoTL Helps Put a Campus Wide Focus on Teaching and Learning

Faculty who have made SoTL a career priority (see profiles of four exemplars in Huber’s 2005 Balancing Acts ) argue in part that they do so because of their passion for student learning. Lee Shulman takes the additional step of arguing that teachers have an ethical obligation to examine the effectiveness of their efforts to “influence the minds of others” (2002). Cross and Steadman’s Classroom Research: Implementing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (1996) provides a tool to assist groups of faculty wanting to examine and apply the research and theory on learning. Huber and Hutchings (2005) give numerous examples of ways in which SoTL might place an increased emphasis on both teaching and learning.