The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

by Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching

What Is SoTL?

A consensus has formed within growing circles in academia that there is scholarly research to be done on teaching and learning, that the systematic creation of rigorous knowledge about teaching and learning is a crucial prerequisite to responding to major challenges facing academia, that this knowledge must be shared publicly and should build cumulatively over time, and that the explorations of this area should be conducted by academics from all disciplines, not just those with appointments in schools of education.

The above quote from David Pace in his article "The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" (American Historical Review, 109:2, October 2004) provides reasons for valuing an approach to teaching commonly called the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).  SoTL involves

  • asking questions about student learning and the teaching activities designed to promote student learning in an effort, at least in part, to improve one's own teaching practice,
  • answering those questions by systematically analyzing evidence of student learning, and
  • sharing the results of that analysis publicly in order to invite review and to contribute to the body of knowledge on student learning in a variety of contexts.

This essay provides some history of the term "scholarship of teaching and learning" and explores key elements of this approach to teaching.

Teaching as a Form of Scholarship

In an effort to define the scholarship performed by professors in academia as more than just "teaching versus research," Ernest L. Boyer, in his influential book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1990), concluded that "the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching." This conceptualization of scholarship elevates the traditional role of teaching from "a routine function, tacked on" to an essential component of a professor's scholarly life. Furthermore, Boyer argued that the academy should recognize and reward all four components of scholarship, including the scholarship of teaching.

Building on Boyer's work, Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I. Maeroff, in their book Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1997), identified six standards against which all scholarly work, including the scholarship of teaching, should be evaluated. Scholarly work should have

  1. Clear goals
  2. Adequate preparation
  3. Appropriate methods
  4. Significant results
  5. Effective presentation
  6. Reflective critique

These goals were chosen to be familiar to faculty members in the context of evaluating the scholarship of discovery (what is traditionally called "research") yet applicable to evaluating the other three types of scholarly work. Thus, by one definition, the scholarship of teaching is teaching that is done in ways that meet these six goals.

Teaching as Community Property

Shortly thereafter, Lee S. Shulman wrote an article titled "Taking Learning Seriously" (Change, 31:4, July/August 1999) in which he presented the following alternate definition of scholarship. 

An act of intelligence or of artistic creation becomes scholarship when it possesses at least three attributes: it becomes public; it becomes an object of critical review and evaluation by members of one's community; and members of one's community begin to use, build upon, and develop those acts of mind and creation.

Shulman argued that in order to take learning seriously as a priority of academia, a scholarship of teaching should be emphasized that meets these three qualities. Shulman's definition of scholarship emphasized the aspects of scholarly work that are done in a community of scholars—an emphasis not present in the definition presented by Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff. The scholarship of teaching, in Shulman's view, presents teaching as "community property" in ways similar to those in which research is viewed as community property.

A Focus on Student Learning

In a following article, "The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments" (Change, 31:5, September/October 1999), Shulman and his co-author Pat Hutchings explained why the idea of a "scholarship of teaching" transformed into a "scholarship of teaching and learning." They wrote that the scholarship of teaching "requires a kind of 'going meta,' in which faculty frame and systemically investigate questions related to student learning—the conditions under which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth—and do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it." Thus, SoTL is not only done publicly to invite critical review and exchange of ideas but also with an emphasis on inquiry into student learning.

In the introduction to Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Carnegie Foundation, 2000), Hutchings presented the following taxonomy of questions in an effort to categorize ways in which faculty members can accomplish this inquiry into student learning.

  • "What works?" – These are questions that seek "evidence about the relative effectiveness of different [teaching] approaches."

  • "What is?" – These are questions that seek to describe, but not evaluate the effectiveness of, different teaching approaches.  These are also questions that seek to describe how students learn.

  • "Visions of the possible" – These are questions related to goals for teaching and learning that have yet to be met or are new to the faculty member asking the questions.

  • "Theory building" questions – These are questions designed to build theoretical frameworks for SoTL similar to frameworks used in other disciplines.

A Focus on Evidence of Student Learning

The ways in which these questions are asked and in which teaching is made community property, available for critique and being built upon, vary among faculty who engage in SoTL. In the Peer Review of Teaching Project, faculty members develop course portfolios in which learning goals, teaching activities and methods, and evidence of student learning are documented and reflected upon by the faculty member teaching the course and his or her peers. Dan Berstein, former director of the project wrote in the article The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Academe, 91:4, July/August 2005), "Sustained inquiry into student learning across semesters that is made widely available in an electronic course portfolio is a high form of scholarship in its own right."

In the same article, Randy Bass, director of the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP), described the SoTL projects initiated by the participants in VKP. Their central questions were "How did they know that their students were learning?" and "Did the students' learning promise to last?" He writes, "By asking these questions, many faculty discovered early on that what most interested—or eluded—them about their student's learning could not be answered simply by looking at regularly assigned course work." Thus VKP makes central the idea of making student learning more visible by collecting evidence of that learning in a variety of forms, some of which are not traditionally used to assess student learning.

Leaders of the Delta Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that the term "scholarship of teaching and learning" had less meaning than the term "teaching-as-research" for the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty and students with whom they work. They present teaching-as-research as having the following nine components.

  1. Informed by the work of others
  2. Includes an explicit question or hypothesis about teaching-learning relationships
  3. Shaped by an explicit design or plan for addressing the question at hand
  4. Collecting credible data as evidence
  5. Analyzing evidence and drawing conclusions
  6. Reflecting and taking action
  7. Cyclical and ongoing
  8. Results are documented and disseminated
  9. The practitioner is principally responsible for the inquiry plan and process

Each of these projects places an emphasis on collecting and analyzing evidence of student learning. While a teacher's personal reflections and the reflections of his or her peers and students are helpful in answering questions about student learning, SoTL involves more than reflections—it involves evidence of student learning.

Examples of SoTL

Sample Projects

  • T. Mills Kelly - History

    In this course portfolio, George Mason University history professor T. Mills Kelly addresses the question, "How does the introduction of hypermedia into a history course influence student learning in that course?" He describes his experience teaching two sections of the same Western Civilization course. In one section, he made primary source documents available on the course web site. In the other section, primary source documents were only available in print form. By surveying students on their use of primary source documents and by analyzing student essays and papers, Mills was able to draw several conclusions about the use of hypermedia in his course.

In this article, Georgetown University mathematics professor James Sandefur describes his investigations into his students' problem solving strategies. He conducted "think alouds" with his students, in which a student is asked to solve a problem and say aloud everything that they think as they do. Sandefur videotaped a number of these think alouds and learned much about the strategies (good and bad) his students often use to solve mathematics problems. He also describes how what he has learned has impacted his teaching.

Galleries of Projects

  • Teaching Certificate Participant Projects

    As part of their work in the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching's Teaching Certificate program, graduate student and post-doc participants complete a small SoTL project. They are also asked to create an online "poster" describing their project. This link leads to a selection of these posters from those who have finished the Teaching Certificate program.

  • The Gallery of Teaching and Learning

    This collection of faculty SoTL work hosted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

  • Carnegie Scholars

    Information on the work of over 140 current and former Carnegie Scholars can be found on this page. Carnegie Scholars is a grant opportunity for faculty doing SoTL work funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that includes a one-year residency at the Foundation.

  • SoTL at SUNY-Buffalo State

    This 2004 report on SoTL at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo State includes reports by six faculty members there on their SoTL projects.

  • Visible Knowledge Project Gallery

    Reports from participants in the Visible Knowledge Project are available in this gallery, organized around the themes of critical reading, multimedia authoring, and online discussion.

  • Peer Review of Teaching Project Showcase Examples

    These course portfolios have been selected from the Peer Review of Teaching Project's database of over 200 course portfolios. One can search the entire database for more examples.

  • Course Portfolios from the University of Kansas

    The University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence works with faculty to develop online course portfolios.

How Is SoTL Done?

General Resources

  • Benchmark and Inquiry Course Portfolios

    At the Peer Review of Teaching Project, SoTL is made public through course portfolios. This page describes two types of portfolios--benchmark course portfolios and inquiry course portfolios. See also their page on formatting and organizing a course portfolio.

  • Delta Program Internship Guidebook

    The Delta Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madision includes an internship component in which graduate students and faculty collaborate on SoTL-like projects. The program's guidebook provides some guidance and prompts for designing, implementing, and reflecting on these kinds of projects.

  • Peer Review of Teaching

    This resource page on the peer review of teaching from the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides information on a variety of ways in which to use peer review of one's teaching to document, assess, and improve one's teaching. Many of these methods would be of use to those conducting SoTL projects.

  • National Science Foundation (NSF) Guide to Evaluation of Educational Projects

    This 92-page guide from the NSF summarizes best practices for a variety quantitative and qualitative evaluations methods for both formative and summative evaluation. Many of these methods would be appropriate methods for SoTL work.

  • Working with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

    This resource kit from the Visible Knowledge Project provides resources for working with IRBs on SoTL projects including sample consent forms and narratives of faculty experiences.

Generating Questions about Student Learning

  • Finding Researchable SoTL Questions

    This resource kit from the Visible Knowledge Project provides a series of activities designed to help one understand important questions to ask in a SoTL project and develop one's own researchable SoTL questions.

  • Narrowing the Question

    This module from the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University is designed to help one move from a broad question about student learning more narrow ones that are amenable to research. The module features a case study in which mathematician Curtis Bennett discusses his own "narrowing" process.

Qualitative Research Methods

  • Coding Data

    This resource kit from the Visible Knowledge Project provides practical advice and tips for working with qualitative research data through a set of techniques known as "coding."

  • Qualitative Approaches

    This page from Central Michigan University provides a listing of various types of qualitative approaches.

  • Think Alouds

"Think alouds" can be used to discover a student's problem solving strategies. In a "think aloud," a student is asked to solve a problem and says aloud everything they think as they do so. "Think alouds" offer valuable insight into a student's thought processes whether they are solving a math problem, interpreting an historical document, or translating a passage. For an example of a "think aloud" in a math class.

Quantitative Research Methods

  • Participant Perception Indicator (PPI)

    The PPI is an assessment tool used to determine students' levels of knowledge, experience, and confidence on tasks identified by the instructor. This page provides several examples of PPIs and how they have been used in SoTL projects.

  • Knowledge Survey

    Knowledge surveys are tools for exploring students' confidence in their ability to solve problems and answer questions in a course or curriculum. This article by Edward Nuhfer and Delores Knipp explores their use and validity as an assessment tool.

Going Public with SoTL

Publishing in Journals

To find journals that publish articles on SoTL from a variety of disciplines, see the following lists of general SoTL journals.

To find journals that publish articles on SoTL from specific disciplines, see the following lists of discipline-specific SoTL journals.

See also Getting SoTL Articles Published--A Few Tips, an article in which Kathleen McKinney, Cross Chair in SoTL and Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University, presents suggestions for publishing SoTL work based on her experience as an author and editor.

Going Public Online

  • Peer Review of Teaching Project

    At the Peer Review of Teaching Project, SoTL is made public through course portfolios. At this site, one can add one's course portfolio to a searchable database of over 200 course portfolios.

  • KEEP Toolkit

    The KEEP Toolkit is a free, online service provided by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that enables one to construct and share web pages describing one's SoTL work.

Conferences

For an up-to-date list of SoTL conferences, see Illinois State University's SoTL Conferences and Institutes page or a similar list of SoTL Meetings from SUNY-Buffalo State.

SoTL Initiatives

National Initiatives

SoTL work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is supported in part by the Center for Teaching Excellence through a SoTL reading group and membership in the Research University Consortium for the Advancement of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (RUCASTL), among other ways.

Campus Initiatives

Bibliography

Exploring the Literature

Articles

Click the article titles below to access online versions of the articles, where available.

Key Articles

The following key articles have either been highly influential in the development of SoTL or provide accessible introductions to the world of SoTL.

Bass, Randy, "The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?", Inventio, 1 (1), 1999.

In this article, Randy Bass compares the use of the word "problem" in traditional scholarly research (where finding a problem to work on is a good thing) and in teaching (where problems are to be avoided). Bass suggests that finding "problems" in one's teaching is an important component of SoTL.
Bender, Eileen T., "CASTLs in the Air: The SOTL 'Movement' in Mid-Flight," Change, September/October 2005. In this article, Eileen Bender provides a history of the SoTL 'movement' and of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL).
Bernstein, Daniel, and Randy Bass, "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," Academe, 91 (4), 2005. In this article, Daniel Bernstein, former director of the Peer Review of Teaching Project, and Randy Bass, director of the Visible Knowledge Project, compare and contrast the scholarship of teaching and learning seen in their respective projects.
Hutchings, Pat, "Approaching the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," introduction to Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Carnegie Foundation, 2000. In this introduction to Opening Lines, Pat Hutchings summarizes and compares the approaches to SoTL taken by the Carnegie Scholars whose articles appear in the rest of the volume. This essay includes the useful “What is?”, “What works?”, and “What’s possible?” taxonomy of SoTL questions.
Hutchings, Pat, and Lee Shulman, "The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments," Change, 31 (5), 1999. Hutchings and Shulman explore the state of the SoTL field in this article and explain why the idea of a "scholarship of teaching" transformed into a "scholarship of teaching and learning."
Shulman, Lee, "Teaching as Community Property: Putting an End to Pedagogical Solitude," Change, 25 (6), 1993. Lee Shulman introduces the idea of making teaching "community property" in this essay and presents three strategies for doing so.

Shulman, Lee, "Taking Learning Seriously," Change, 31 (4), 1999.

In this article, Lee Shulman examines the professional roles and responsibilities of faculty at academic institutions in regard to teaching, learning, and SoTL.

Shulman, Lee, "From Minsk to Pinsk: Why a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?", The Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 1 (1), 2000. In this article, Lee Shulman gives three reasons why faculty members should pursue SoTL: professionalism, pragmaticism, and policy.

Other Articles

The following articles address particular aspects of SoTL.
Booth, Alan, "Rethinking the Scholarly: Developing the Scholarship of Teaching in History," Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 3 (3), 2004. Historian Alan Booth explores in this article the teaching/research dynamic and its relationship to SoTL in the particular discipline of history.
Fincher, Ruth-Marie E., et al., "Scholarship in Teaching: An Imperative for the 21st Century," Academic Medicine, 75 (9), 2000. In this article a number of professors of medicine argue for a scholarship of teaching and learning in the medical field and propose organizational changes to support it.
Huber, Mary Taylor, and Pat Hutchings, "Building the Teaching Commons," Change, 38 (3), 2006. In this article, Huber and Hutchings highlight some of the points made in their book, The Advance of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons, concerning the development of a "conceptual space in which communities of educators... come together to share ideas about teaching and learning."
Hutchings, Pat, and Susan E. Clarke, "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Contributing to Reform in Graduate Education," in Paths to the Professoriate: Strategies for Enriching the Preparation of Future Faculty, edited by Donald Wulff and Anne Austin, Jossey-Bass, 2004. This article features a discussion of ways in which SoTL can impact graduate education, particularly for those graduate students intending to pursue academic careers.
Mettetal, Gwynn, "The What, Why and How of Classroom Action Research," Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2 (1), 2001.
 This article provides a summary of a form of SoTL called classroom action research.
Pace, David, "The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching," American Historical Review, 109 (4), 2004. Historian David Pace explores in this article the ways in which SoTL can and should be done in the particular discipline of history.
Shapiro, Howard, "Promotion & Tenure & the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning," Change, 38 (2), 2006. Shapiro gives an inside look at the tenure and promotion process and how it values research and teaching. He also argues that if universities want to take teaching seriously, they need to take SoTL seriously.
Shulman, Lee, "Visions of the Possible: Models for Campus Support of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," accessed December 9, 2005. Lee Shulman gave two conference talks in 1999 detailing four ways in which a campus can support SoTL and integrate it in its academy life. This article is a summary of those talks.
"Roundtable on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Political Science," PS: Political Science and Politics, 35 (2), 2002. This article provides a transcript of a roundtable discussion among several political scientists about SoTL in their discipline.

Books

Most of the following books are available from the Vanderbilt Library. Click the "ACORN entry" link to find out holdings and location information.

Becker, William, and Moya L. Andrews, eds., The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Indiana University Press, 2004.

 This volume collects papers from three SoTL conferences held at Indiana University-Bloomington. ACORN entry

Cambridge, Barbara, ed., Campus Progress: Supporting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Stylus, 2004.

 This volume collects essays from over 40 colleges and universities describing their institutional and organizational efforts to support SoTL. ACORN entry
Huber, Mary Taylor, and Sherwyn P. Morreale, eds., Disciplinary Styles In The Scholarship Of Teaching And Learning: Exploring Common Ground, Carnegie Foundation, 2002. This volume features essays by faculty members reflecting on the state of research into teaching and learning in their respective academic disciplines. The introduction and table of contents to this volume are available online. ACORN entry
Huber, Mary Taylor, ed., Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers, Carnegie Foundation, 2004. This volume features essays by scholars reflecting on the ways in which their careers, particularly aspects of tenure and promotion, have been affected by their SoTL work. The forward to this volume is available online. ACORN entry
Huber, Mary Taylor, and Pat Hutchings, The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons, Jossey-Bass, 2005. In this volume the authors survey the current SoTL landscape and describe ways in which faculty and institutions can and do use SoTL to improve the quality of higher education. An essay by the authors on the same topic is available online. ACORN entry
Hutchings, Pat, ed., Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Carnegie Foundation, 2000. This volume features essays by past Carnegie Scholars reflecting on ways in which they began their SoTL work. The introduction and conclusion to this volume are available online. ACORN entry
Hutchings, Pat, ed., Ethics of Inquiry, Issues in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Carnegie Foundation, 2002.

 This volume features essays by faculty members pursuing SoTL work reflecting on the ethical dimensions of SoTL. The forward and introduction to this volume are available online. ACORN entry
Kreber, Carolin, ed., Scholarship Revisited: Perspectives on the Scholarship of Teaching, New Directions for Teaching and Learning No. 86, Jossey-Bass, 2001.

 This volume collects essays on several aspects of SoTL, including its relations to research and to "scholarly teaching" as well as assessment of SoTL and SoTL's role in faculty and graduate student development. Vanderbilt faculty, staff, and students can access this volume online here through FindIt@VU. ACORN entry
Richlin, Laurie, ed., Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 14 (2), 2003.

 Technically, this is an issue of a journal, not a book, but it collects essays on different aspects of and approaches to SoTL from several authors. Vanderbilt faculty, staff, and students can access this volume online here.  

SoTL at Vanderbilt

  • Center for Teaching - Consultations

    The Center for Teaching provides a wide range of confidential consultation services to individuals for developmental and formative purposes. If you are interested in pursuing a SoTL project at Vanderbilt and would like to discuss your ideas with a CFT consultant, please contact the CFT at 2-7290 or via email.

  • Center for Teaching - Teaching Certificiate Program

    The Teaching Certificate program has been designed to help graduate students, professional students, and post-doctoral fellows develop and refine their teaching skills through three cycles of teaching activities, each consisting of inquiry, experimentation, and reflection phases.

    The third cycle involves the design and implementation of a SoTL project. During this cycle, participants participate in a SoTL Working Group designed to provide participants with mentoring and feedback on their projects from CFT consultants and from peers engaging in similar projects.

  • VaNTH Engineering Research Center

    VaNTH is a National Science Foundation-funded engineering research center consisting of Vanderbilt and three other institutions. Its mission is to "transform bioengineering education to produce adaptive experts by developing, implementing and assessing educational processes, materials and technologies that are readily accessible and widely disseminated."

    Locally, VaNTH has provided resources for biomedical engineering and education faculty to collaborate on rigorous SoTL projects aimed at developing and assessing biomedical engineering teaching modules, teaching practices, and educational technologies.

  • Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning

    The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) is a National Science Foundation-funded network of universities intended to "promote the development of a national faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) committed to implementing and advancing effective teaching practices for diverse student audiences as part of their professional careers."

    One of the three "pillars" of CIRTL's work is "Teaching-as-Research," another way of describing SoTL. In the spring of 2006, Vanderbilt joined the CIRTL Network, and has begun exploring ways of collaborating with the network institutions to fulfill CIRTL's mission locally by building on and interconnecting Vanderbilt's current strengths in STEM education and professional development.

  • Visible Knowledge Project

    The Visible Knowledge Project (VKP), a recently-completed five-year, multi-campus initiative, explored the relationships between teaching, technology, and learning, focusing on the idea that technology can make knowledge (i.e., student learning) more visible and can thus assist teachers in determining whether or not they are meeting their teaching goals.

    Locally, a number of Vanderbilt faculty participated in the project, conducting individual SoTL projects. Some of them have made online "posters" describing their projects available, including Marshall Eakin, Peter Felten, Terersa Goddu, Mark Schoenfield, and Mark Wollaeger.


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