Teaching & Learning Scholarship


Viewing teaching as scholarly work is essential. Teachers so often have to carry out their work in isolation from their colleagues. The result is that those who engage in innovative acts of teaching do not have many opportunities to build upon the work of others."
- Lee S. Shulman, president emeritus of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

What is Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?

With the increased focus on enhancing teaching and learning, Inquiry about student learning has become more common in institutions of higher education. A goal is to assist all instructors to become scholarly teachers; that is, to be knowledgeable in pedagogy and reflective about their teaching practices. Those who wish to contribute to our knowledge of pedagogy and learning do so through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This endeavor as defined by Pat Hutching and Lee Schulman (Change, 1999) is a rigorous examination of the relationship of teaching and learning and is characterized by “being public, open to critique and evaluation, and in a form that others can build on.”

SoTL work is a systematic reflection and investigation of our classrooms. It is a bridge between the acts of teaching and research, with explicit focus on enhancing student learning. It is asking questions about what works, what doesn’t, and why and then transforming these activities into collecting and analyzing evidence of student learning.

INTRODUCTION TO SOTL

HOW TO BEGIN SOTL

EXAMPLES OF SOTL

On our campus:

  • The Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) was created to enhance and expand undergraduate research opportunities on our campus.
  • The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created the Carnegie Scholars Program for selected individuals to participate in a one-year residency to create a SoTL project. Two faculty members from our campus were selected as Carnegie Scholars: Michael Loui, Electrical and Computing Engineering, 2003 and Vernon Burton, History, 2000
  • At the inaugural 2004 meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, our campus presented twenty-one presentations.
  • The University’s participation in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL):
    • CASTL Campus Program:
      The university was selected to be a member of the Research University Consortium for the Advancement of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (RUCASTL). As a member, our campus joined fourteen other institutions and disciplinary societies working toward the building SoTL as an integral part of a research university’s identity and mission. (1993-1996)
    • CASTL Institutional Leadership Program: The CASTL Campus Program Leadership Cluster was created to facilitate collaboration among institutions to investigate specific theme for the improvement of student learning. The university joined the leadership cluster of “Undergraduate Research and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (1996-1999)
  • Provost Initiative for Teaching Advancement (PITA) Grants. The Office of the Provost provides grants to fund individuals to design, implement, and assess instructional innovation that will enhance the campus excellence in teaching and learning. You can find examples of funded PITA grant projects on the PITA website.
  • SoTL @ IDEALS is the university’s digital repository for research and scholarship. The SoTL @ IDEALS is a collection of published and/or presented SoTL research by our campus community. To have your SoTL project included in this collection, please contact Blair Goodlin (goodlin@illinois.edu), a unit administrator for SoTL.
  • Illinois Physics Education Research (PER) is research into the learning, understanding and teaching of physics and the application of physics knowledge. This website contains many resources from content and multimedia to publications and presentations that are informative for all disciplines.

ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES OF SOTL

GOING PUBLIC