SoTL projects can look very different depending on the academic discipline, but there are a number of characteristics of and strategies for designing SoTL projects that are common across disciplines and contexts.

Some academic teachers describe SoTL projects they have done:

Nancy Chick, a prominent SoTL scholar, has assembled a useful general guide for SoTL projects. The general process she describes is similar to the way we do regular academic research, especially research involving some form of experimentation or collection of empirical evidence:

1. Formulate a question that will focus inquiry in the project
2. Review relevant literature to inform your approach
3. Consider ethical issues that may arise
4. Identify the type of evidence or empirical material to gather
5. Plan the project design and implement it to collect evidence
6. Analyze your evidence or empirical material using credible methods
7. Go public by producing an artifact that you can share

Start with a question
A SoTL project begins with a question. The origin of that question might be an observation, a reflection, or simple curiosity. Pat Hutchings identifies four categories of questions you might ask:

1. Is it working?
We try something new with our teaching and want to know if it works. Or perhaps we think something might not be working, and want to figure out if that is true.

2. What does it look like?
This category of question aims to describe something happening in teaching and learning, so that we can better understand it and often make better use of it.

3. What might it look like?
This is an aspirational or forward-thinking type of question. It is interested in what might happen if we redesigned something or changed the way we approach a particular aspect of academic teaching and/or learning.

4. How do we make meaning of this?
This type of question is concerned with generating theory. Its aim is to build new models and/or conceptual frameworks that can better help us conceptualize and make meaning of teaching and learning.

Further reading:

Open access: Nancy Chick's SoTL guide: https://nancychick.wordpress.com/sotl-guide/

Hutchings, P. (2000). Introduction: Approaching the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In Hutchings, P. (Ed.), Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Open access: Scanned PDF available here: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED449157