Be curious about your teaching!
The Educationalist. By Alexandra Mihai
Welcome to a new issue of “The Educationalist”! With a new Academic Year starting or about to start soon, I thought it’s a great time to reflect on how we look at our teaching and our students’ learning. Of course, for many academics, teaching is (only) one part of the job and the reality is that a large coarse load often means even spending time thinking about this can be a luxury, let alone doing something, like experimenting or, why not, doing some research related to our teaching. But what I also see around me often enough to make me hopeful are people who really care about students, about knowing how their students learn so they can better support them. They show this in the way they design their syllabi, in the way they communicate with students and involve them actively in their learning. And, yes, they also show it by doing what is called the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). I see SoTL as the perfect occasion to use our scholarly minds to better understand what is going on in our classrooms. And while not everyone has time- and interest- to really do publishable research on their teaching, I see SoTL also as a way to be curious and engaged with our teaching, by applying our research flameworks and tools to it. And I also see it as a common language we can use to share our experiences with peers across disciplines. Below I will outline some of what I consider to be the benefits of engaging with SoTL and a few useful resources if you are willing to give it a try. Have a nice week!
A couple of months ago while I was attending the EuroSoTL Conference in Groningen, I suddenly felt nostalgic and after some soul searching I understood why: my journey into education started through SoTL. I am what I am today- an academic highly invested in providing quality education and supporting colleagues in doing so- because about 20 years ago, as a fresh Politics graduate, I became interested in teaching (online, in that specific instance) and started to look closer into the courses I was developing and teaching. This is how I started to meet colleagues from the discipline who were doing the same, and our exchanges and collaborations only fuelled my curiosity. Some of my first publications are SoTL papers about teaching Politics, but beside publications I also fondly remember the many interesting international projects focusing on teaching and curriculum development. All this eventually led to me transitioning to Educational Sciences while also, in parallel, being heavily involved in educational development. A mix I came to treasure and would not want to change, as it provides me with a multi-faceted and always exciting professional experience.
Of course, every story is different. Not everyone who engages with SoTL will eventually leave their initial discipline and become an educationalist. Nor do they have to. The beauty of this SoTL “tribe”, I find, is precisely the diversity. It is essentially educators from various disciplines who share the passion and curiosity for how their students learn. Whether we do it with the aim to publish, to improve our teaching, to facilitate student learning and performance, it’s all about the attitude: going into the classroom with the curiosity and the scholarly mentality that we use in our research.
Why do SoTL?
As an educational developer, I know it’s not easy to get colleagues to engage with SoTL. There are quite a few challenges (more below), both individual and institutional, and the bottom line is: you need a good dose of intrinsic motivation and passion for teaching to even get started. But once you dipped your toes in it, and hopefully had some support to start with, the value of SoTL becomes clear to educators at all stages of their careers.
What’s in it for you as an academic?
SoTL can help you:
Understand how your students learn- by analysing their engagement patterns, their preferences and performance;
Explore the effectiveness of your teaching methods and activities- by gathering evidence, going beyond the usual metrics (student evaluations);
Find answers to some challenges you identify in the classroom- by exploring the learning mechanisms and applying educational theory in the context of your course;
Better support your students, using the evidence collected in that very context, making it more relevant;
Connect with peer educators in your discipline and across disciplines- to share experiences, ideas and maybe establish some collaborative endeavours.
Why is the SoTL community important?
Whether or not you have the time and disposition to actively contribute with your own projects, it’s important to acknowledge that the existence of such a community with its research repositories and conferences is an invaluable asset for all educators. I did say “community” but I actually mean “communities”, and the plural form is very relevant as it can help us locate the “tribe” closer to us from different perspectives. There is the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), the EuroSoTL Network, its European branch and then there are SoTL communities in each discipline. Being part of any such community gives us access to knowledge rooted in teaching practice that can help us unlock challenges we face as teachers and get new ideas to implement in our courses. Also, looking at it from a bird’s eye view, SoTL literature provides valuable knowledge of how learning happens across disciplines.
Challenges
But, as beautiful and useful as it may sound, we need to be aware that there are quite a few challenges that stand in the way of getting engaged in SoTL activities. Here are some of them:
Not enough time: doing research on your teaching takes extra time: gathering evidence, reading educational theory and analysing the findings in this light, writing up… all takes time and this is one currency that we are struggling to distribute among all the tasks our jobs require;
Not enough support: like in the case of other teaching- related professional development activities, the level of support from CTLs/ educational developers varies widely and in some cases SoTL falls outside the scope of this support; thus educators are left alone to explore this new territory;
SoTL not recognised on a par with disciplinary research: an important incentive to go the extra mile with your teaching activity is having your efforts recognised in the context of the yearly appraisals and promotion/ tenure process. While I do notice changes in this respect in the past decades, it is not always the case that SoTL activities and publications have the same weight as the discipline-related ones;
“Don’t know where to start”: passion and enthusiasm about your teaching are crucial to try out SoTL. But to really succeed you do need to get familiar with educational theory, as a lens that helps you put together the pieces and solve your puzzle. Here is where, without specific support, many of us struggle and eventually give up.
Below I offer some tips on how you, as an educator, can get started with SoTL. But looking at the challenges above, it is clear that there is an institutional dimension to it as well. Support can take the form of advice in terms of literature and theoretical frameworks but also grants and opportunities for collaboration. As for recognition, it can be formal (part of career progression) but also informal through various awards and opportunities to share and discuss the work with colleagues. It’s all about giving a signal that SoTL is an important part of academic life and thus something worth pursuing.
A few tips to get started
If you’ve read so far and think “oh well, I would like to give it a try”, then here are some ideas on how to get started:
Find an idea. Or let it find you. Actually, if you want to give SoTL a try you probably already have some “problems” you are thinking of, so it’s more a matter of writing them down and reflecting on them. They could be related to something you noticed in class (e.g. students’ attitudes, engagement) or questions you have about what methods or activities to use. A key aspect here is being curious and fully in tune with what is going on in your course. A tool that can help you keep track of that and reflect systematically is a teaching journal.
Start reading. Here is where you are about to step out of your comfort zone. Because what you need to read is not really literature from your discipline, but educational science sources. This can be intimidating at first, but with a bit of guidance (and the help of some of the resources below) you will slowly become familiar with the new jargon and frameworks. One piece of advice is to start reading journals that focus on education in your discipline, e.g. medical education, engineering education, business education. Articles published in these journals can act as a useful bridge between your discipline and educational science.
Collect data. Here is where you go into the classroom with a research hat on. There is a variety of ways you can collect data, from analysing assignments and course engagement to doing interviews, focus groups or administering surveys. Data analytics can also be helpful if you have a substantive part of your course activity online. Whatever means of data collection you decide is suitable to your project, you need to communicate this clearly to your students and explain that being part of the research or declining to do so will not have any negative consequence on their grade, etc. You can also mention how the data will be processed and who will have access. Chances are you will have had to think of all this for the ethics approval at your university.
Get a “buddy”. SoTL research doesn’t have to be lonely. In fact it is double the fun if you team up with a colleague or two. It can be something informal, like a buddy to bounce off ideas with, but it can also be more formal, like a collaborative project. Think of what makes sense for you: having someone from the same discipline or even teaching the same course can be nice, but an inter-faculty/ interdisciplinary project can also be valuable and help you gain insights you otherwise wouldn’t.
Analyse and write. I am sure these need no further explaining. Now that you have all the puzzle pieces, all you need to do is… well, do the work: data analysis and writing up. I want to mention here that I don’t think all the SoTL work has to become publishable (otherwise we might never even start). While we do strive for that, I feel that the most valuable part is doing the work itself and having the chance to present/ share it in whatever form. It can be a conference, a workshop, a blog. Or it can simply be the evidence you base the next course iteration on. Think about it, and don’t let the fact you don’t have time to polish it to a publishable form stop you from pursuing this important work.
Remember: SoTL is not a luxury. It’s a way to meaningfully weave teaching and research together.
Resources
Utrecht Roadmap for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning- your step-by step-guide to researching your teaching practice;
The SoTL Guide, by Nancy Chick- useful resources for your SoTL journey;
Chick, N.L. (2023). Rereading SoTL: Toward New Beginnings. Innov High Educ, 48, 977–989.
Open Scholarship for Teaching and Learning- journal where you can find SoTL research from various contexts.
