What is the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning?

Mary Ann Tobin, Consultant, Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence

The term Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) dates back to the early 1990s, but the practice of reflecting on one’s teaching strategies and methodologies and the impact they have on student learning has a much longer history. How, what and why we must teach children and young adults appears in the religious and philosophical texts of many ancient civilizations, and with the Enlightenment came a bevy of educational treatises laying out curricula for teaching future citizens how to function in society according to their expected lots in life. These treatises also contain pedagogy detailing the how, what and why teachers should go about their profession in order to maximize student learning. In 1692 for example, Englishman John Locke asserts that a “tutor should remember, that his business is not so much to teach [his student] all that is knowable, as [it is] to raise in him a love and esteem of knowledge; and to put him in the right way of knowing and improving himself when he has a mind to it.” In other words, those who teach must know their content as well as how to convey that content to their students, and SoTL provides us with a systematic and empirical method to posit, test and assess best practices to accomplish that goal.

In his seminal Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate, Ernest L. Boyer coins the phrase “scholarship of teaching,” situating it in the research-focused missions of the typical American university and asserting that it will result in the professoriate being made up of “scholars who not only skillfully explore the frontiers of knowledge, but also integrate ideas, connect thought to action, and inspire students.” For Boyer, the practice of employing research methods to one’s teaching is just as important as conducting research in one’s discipline, but it had not yet been recognized as such. He calls for “research centers where undergraduate instruction also will be honored . . . where the scholarship of teaching is a central mission.”

As part of our Advanced Course in College Teaching (ACCT), we invited participants to engage in such research. Prior to the first session, participants were asked to identify a problem in a specific course that they would like to address. Those problems ranged from students coming to class unprepared, not satisfactorily completing assignments or even attempting them, or having a difficult time with course content, to concerns about how much course content can reasonably be covered in a given semester. In subsequent weeks, participants were introduced to Classroom Action Research, a problem-based mode of inquiry, in which they posited a solution and how it might resolve or at least lessen the degree of the problem. In order to measure the impact of the intervention on student learning, their intervention was to align with course-level learning objectives and performance-based assessment tools. The faculty also were expected to research best practices to guide their plans. They were then to implement the intervention right away or in a future semester, assess the resulting change in student learning, and report their findings using a model developed by Western Carolina University’s Coulter Faculty Center. This site contains a summary of the results of those efforts.

Resources

Boyer, Ernest L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Case studies in the scholarship of teaching and learning at Western Carolina University. (2004). Cullowhee, NC: Coulter Faculty Center. https://www.wcu.edu/WebFiles/PDFs/facultycenter_Layout10.pdf

Locke, J. (1693). Some thoughts concerning education. Hoboken, N.J.: Generic NL Freebook Publisher.

Mettetal, G. (2001). The what, why and how of classroom action research. 2 (1). Journal of Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, Indiana University. https://josotl.indiana.edu/issue/view/137