2010 Lilly Conference of Greensboro
Preconference Workshops
Thursday, February 4, 2010 1-5 pm
Cost: $70.00
1) Getting Started with a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Project
Karen Hornsby and Scott Simkins, NC A&T State University
Participants will receive a book on SoTL
Formally introduced by Ernest Boyer in 1990, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has taken on growing importance during the last 5-10 years as a valued type of academic scholarship and as a means of developing a "teaching commons" (Huber & Hutchings, 2005), a public, communal research effort aimed at improving student learning and advancing classroom practice. While the concept of the scholarship of teaching and learning may be attractive to many faculty members, getting started in SoTL research can be daunting: What exactly is the scholarship of teaching and learning? How would I do it? What would I need to know? How, where, and with whom would I share my questions and my findings? Why should I do it? This session is aimed at those who want answers to these questions. After a brief SoTL primer, including a start-to-finish SoTL example, participants will develop their own SoTL questions focused on student learning in their courses (e.g., Why don't my students read before class? How can this group project be made more meaningful? How can I reduce high failure rates in my course?) and begin to formulate plans for researching those questions. Through small- and large-group discussions, participants will have a chance to gain feedback on emerging SoTL questions, share ideas about how to move forward with a SoTL project, and develop plans for sharing SoTL research with colleagues. By the end of this session participants should have a firm understanding of SoTL research and the confidence to begin carrying out small-scale inquiries on student learning in their own classes.
Preconference Information - (PDF) is also available for download.
Please note: some items require the Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, which can be downloaded from the Adobe web site.