“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

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

• Lee Shulman (January 2011) provides his personal reflection about SoTL.
• The SoTL website at Vanderbilt’s University’s Center for Teaching provides a comprehensive introduction to SoTL from answering the question of what is SoTL and how to get started to going public and sharing results. 
• The University of Central Florida Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning provides additional definitions of SoTL.

How to begin SoTL

• The SoTL website at Vanderbilt’s University’s Center for Teaching provides information on ways to begin and how to use quantitative and qualitative research methods.
• Kathleen McKinney, Cross Endowed Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Illinois State University, provides an overview of research methods for doing SoTL.
• Direct links to our discipline-specific electronic journals, in addition to information about conferences on teaching and learning and a searchable database, can be accessed through the University Library. Note: Access to journals is restricted to the University of Illinois community.

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 theme of the 2003 Illinois Faculty Retreat’s was The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Lee Shulman as the plenary speaker. Excerpts from his talk are here.
• 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 identify 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.  Here is a sampling of the funded PITA grants.
• 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 Cheelan Bo-Linn (cbolinn@illinois.edu) at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning.
• 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

• There are several collections of SoTL projects located at the Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching and Learning SoTL site.
• The Illinois State University SoTL site provides examples of small grant projects.

Going public

•  Kathleen McKinney offers some strategies on getting SoTL projects published.
• The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) provides national and international SoTL links, in addition to a list of journals for SoTL publications. 
• The Illinois State University SoTL site provides information on national and international SoTL conferences.