Kate Cammack, CfT Co-Director
A major feature (and joy!) of our job, as educators, is that we get to try new approaches to promote student learning and figure out whether these approaches are working or not.
SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching & Learning; “SoTL” rhymes with “anecdotal”) is the systematic inquiry about student learning. Briefly, it is the process by which we, as educators, formulate a question about an aspect of our pedagogy (e.g., “Is this class activity that I designed actually helping students to learn X?”), collecting evidence, and analyzing what we find.
Some professionals devote their entire careers to developing & sharing impactful educational research projects. Other faculty members pursue SoTL questions as one component of their larger scholarly portfolio. But all of us are likely using SoTL ideas or literature to inform our teaching practices.
In fact, there are interesting perspectives on the extent to which scholarly teaching (using or applying SoTL ideas) and the SoTL process are the same, distinct, or part of the same continuum:
This year, we’re trying a new series on the CfT blog called SoTL Corner, where our community can share summaries and key takeaways from SoTL literature. We hope to post a SoTL Corner each month, and look forward to hearing your feedback & responses about their usefulness and value.
To jump-start us in this process, you might check out 60-Second SoTL, a series of brief, 1-4 minute podcast episodes on recent SoTL ideas or publications, hosted by Elon University. Enjoy an episode on a quick stretch break, walk or commute!
Curious about where to find SoTL resources? Here are helpful tips for finding SoTL resources and a list of SoTL journals that range from general to discipline-specific. If you encounter a good resource not on that list, please send it my way so that we can share it more widely!
Interested in contributing to SoTL Corner with a summary of a SoTL article? Please contact Kate at kmcammac@sewanee.edu