The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
On Thursday, April 30th, Associate Director Donna Troka and Dean’s Teaching Fellow Ania Kowalik led a workshop on how to begin a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research project. SoTL encourages faculty to connect the work they are doing in the classroom to the large body of educational research.
The workshop introduced twenty-five faculty to the steps for developing a SoTL project, encouraged them to think through a SoTL research question and hypothesis, and created time for faculty to begin to sketch out a SoTL project.
As faculty worked in pairs and then came back to the larger discussion three questions emerged:
- Is one required to work with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) when doing SoTL research?
- How does one navigate the ethics of doing this kind of “experimental” teaching with our students?
- How do we measure the validity of the assessment tools we create for our research projects? Resources to help answer these questions are being made available to participants.
Next steps for faculty interested in developing a SoTL project are: working individually with the CFDE to further develop their projects and participating in an Academic Learning Community (ALC) on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which will be offered next academic year. Details about the ALC will be posted on the CFDE website and circulated on the CFDE website.
Please direct any questions you have about SoTL to Donna Troka at dtroka@emory.edu