Excerpts from an
essay by Bill Cerbin on SOTL
(From http://www.uwlax.edu/sotl/subpages/sotldefinedpage.htm):
SoTL
Defined
The term, "scholarship of teaching,"
became popular in the early 1990's with the publication of Ernest
Boyer's monograph, Scholarship Reconsidered . The phrase has acquired
a number of quite different meanings-some equate it with scholarly
teaching, some with innovative teaching, or with specialized educational
research. And some view it as any activity to improve teaching.
In the past 5-6 years a predominant view of SoTL has emerged mainly
from the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching and its current president, Lee Shulman. Lee has a standard
mantra about SoTL. It goes like this:
Scholarly teaching is what every one of us should be engaged in
every day that we are in a classroom, in our office with students,
tutoring, lecturing, conducting discussions, all the roles we
play pedagogically. Our work as teachers should meet the highest
scholarly standards of groundedness, of openness, of clarity and
complexity. But it is only when we step back and reflect systematically
on the teaching we have done, in a form that can be publicly reviewed
and built upon by our peers, that we have moved from scholarly
teaching to the scholarship of teaching.
So, like other forms of scholarship, the scholarship of teaching
is work that is public and work that is open to peer review, and
work that can be built upon. Moreover, it is work that focuses
directly on student learning and development. Boyer used the term
"Scholarship of Teaching," the phrase now is The Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning-or SoTL. SoTL is based on the premise
that the purpose of teaching is to advance student learning, and
the purpose of SoTL is to improve the practice of teaching through
scholarly inquiry into teaching and student learning.
SoTL is a form of inquiry. Specifically it is a kind of practitioner
research that focuses on teaching and student learning in one's
own classroom. SoTL starts with faculty questions about student
learning. Instructors explore those questions through systematic,
disciplined inquiry, and then report their findings for peer review.
This type of inquiry has two major purposes-to improve the instructor's
own teaching and to advance the practice of teaching more generally.
