Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

In 1998, under the leadership of President Lee S. Shulman, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Association of Higher Education initiated a program to promote scholarly approaches to teaching and learning. Based on Ernest Boyer’s expansion of scholarship to include inquiry into teaching (Scholarship Reconsidered 1990), this national SOTL initiative had at least three primary objectives: 1) to improve the learning of all students, 2) to advance the profession and practice of teaching, and 3) to recognize and reward this kind of inquiry in ways afforded to other forms of scholarly work in higher education. To those ends, CASTL sponsors three tiers of SOTL engagement by working with individual faculty, scholarly societies, and cluster campuses.

SOTL invites us to:

examine practice, document what works, and exchange our findings with others
address research questions that emerge from our own lived learning experiences, e.g. Does midterm feedback make a difference in student learning?
study the places “in between” teaching and learning in order to understand the whole learning process better
build on the idea of teaching excellence “with its focus on effective practice” as well as on scholarly teaching “with its focus on theoretical soundness”(Les Shulman)
use a model of reflective inquiry into teaching and learning that is marked by peer review and a public exchange of findings, including working with SOTL inquirers at other institutions

SoTL Resources

http://www.issotl.org/tutorial/sotltutorial/home.html

CASTL Campus Program

CASTL Institutional Leadership

Student Voices in Action at WWU

Citizenship Across the Curriculum

Engaging Student Voices in the Study of Teaching and Learning

What is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in Higher Education? (Kathleen McKinney, Illinois State University)

The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem? (Randy Bass, Georgetown University)

Introduction: Approaching the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning by Pat Hutchings (2000)

Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL)

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL)

A Tutorial on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL website, developed by Indiana University Bloomington and Samuel Thompson)

SoTL Journals

This list is taken from the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning's website: http://www.issotl.org/SOTL.html

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