Where do I start?

With your students! They are an endless source of ideas for the scholarship of teaching. Many staff have made particular studies of when students first commence university. Others focus on particular student cohorts within their unit. Often we start to engage in SoTL because we have a problem in a class that we want to solve (Bass, 1998). For example, students may not understand particular key concepts even after they have studied your unit, or you may want to incorporate more peer learning opportunities, or change your assessment to better allow students to demonstrate their achievement (remember to submit the appropriate documentation for an assessment change, if you need to).

While you might simply talk with other colleagues about any aspects of your teaching, curriculum or the learning environment, it’s likely that the problem you want to address is already discussed in the learning and teaching literature, and if not in your discipline, then in another. There may already be an evidence base for addressing the problem.

Partly because of the work of Boyer and colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (its title now adds ‘and Learning’ at the end), there is a wealth of material available online on almost any tertiary education matter. At the end of the module, we have included some key resources that you can use into the future.

Students as partners in SoTL

You may be in a position, as you develop your teaching career, to include your students as partners in your SoTL research. There are several reasons for doing this, including:

• to gain further insight into the higher education experience of your students beyond what you would gain with the students as the subject of your research;
• changing the power dynamic between the students and yourself; 
• further engaging students;
• increasing student ownership of their learning (see the University of Queensland's Students as Partners webpage Links to an external site.),

Professor Mick Healey, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, University of Gloucestershire, has a comprehensive resource of case studies and publications Links to an external site. which describe many different examples of student/staff SoTL collaborations in the Students as Partners and Change Agents Bibliography available on that webpage.

 

Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/board-school-slate-teaching-812129/