Become a Scholar of Teaching and Learning

How do we continue to grow as teachers? How do we develop ourselves as educational leaders? The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is focused on treating our teaching as we do our other academic disciplines – we engage in research to investigate impact and scope, and share those findings with the community, as well as make changes to our practice to reflect what we have learned. In this theme, you will see the ways in which SoTL can become an important part of your own professional teaching career.

In order to complete the theme, you much register for and complete each of the sessions listed below. In addition, you must complete the pre-session module before the institute begins, and the post session module after the final session in the theme. If you complete the whole theme, you will be eligible for a signed letter of completion on this theme to be placed in your Teaching Portfolio.

Developing a SoTL Project

Have you or the course instructor tried a new teaching technique (or want to) but remain unsure of whether it was effective? Are you curious about the effect of some practices in your course? Would you like to learn more about your students and their learning?

This workshop will help you design a research project to evaluate quality of teaching and learning in your course. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is the systematic inquiry into teaching and learning processes and their effectiveness, made public. In this workshop you will learn the fundamentals of SoTL in terms of approaches, ethical considerations, and first steps. You will leave the workshop with a better understanding of SoTL practices, as well as a blueprint for your very first SoTL project.

You invest a lot in improving your teaching – this workshop will help you evaluate whether you achieve your goals, using a research lens.

The 2017 TA Institute has ended. For details on this workshop, see it’s event description.

Giving Guest Lectures and Presentations

In this session, we will compare and contrast presentations and guest lectures. With this, we will design a toolkit to prepare for successful presentations or guest lectures. Finally, we will collaboratively explore common challenges associated with public speaking and practice strategies to overcome these.

The 2017 TA Institute has ended. For details on this workshop, see it’s event description.

Incorporating Results from SoTL

This session provides a framework for analyzing and incorporating The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) into classroom practices. SoTL involves scholarly inquiry into student learning and making findings public, in order to advance teaching and learning. A large body of literature contains findings from SoTL inquiries across numerous disciplines. In this session, participants will be introduced to SoTL and the body of literature associated with this field of study. This session consists of three parts:

  1. Identifying ways to incorporate SoTL and SoTL results into your teaching
  2. Describing strategies for introducing teaching approaches into the classroom
  3. Developing strategies to gather feedback from students to inform your practice

Examples in this session will be drawn from a variety of disciplines to provoke discussion across a broad range of subject areas and classroom environments.

The 2017 TA Institute has ended. For details on this workshop, see it’s event description.

Please note – In order to qualify for the letter of completion for this theme:

  1. You must attend and complete all three of the sessions listed above
  2. The pre-session work must be completed before 8:00 am on January 10, 2017
  3. The post-session work must be completed between 5:30 pm on January 12 and 5:30 pm on January 23

Pre-session work

 

Post-session work

 


Resources