Using SoTL to develop your teaching

We have already seen that SoTL is an activity you can engage in at various stages of your development as an academic teacher, but that some consider teaching scholar (a teacher who does SoTL) to be a top level of development for academic teachers. Higher education scholar Carolin Kreber (2002) makes an important distinction between a teaching scholar and another sort of top achiever, an excellent teacher. An excellent teacher is one whose performance in her teaching is perceived as successful by the audience (students, peers, the teacher herself, etc.). Rather than being concerned with producing new knowledge about teaching and learning, as with SoTL, teaching excellence is focused specifically on performing actual teaching, especially in terms of connecting with students and other people experiencing the teaching. In your own development as an academic teacher, it probably makes sense to see teaching excellence as an overall goal. 

But when you think about actually working toward that goal, you need to think in terms of a process. In her article, Kreber also discusses teaching expertise. An expert teacher is one who continually seeks to develop her practice:

Expert teachers ... would not exclusively rely on experience but would continuously construct new knowledge as they combine their declarative knowledge of educational theory with their procedural knowledge of how to teach. They rely upon their implicit knowledge of how to self-regulate their learning. In this way they advance theory and at the same time perform effectively. (p. 15)

We can think of the difference between excellence and expertise as the difference between a an outcome and a a process. Excellence is a level you can achieve, whereas expertise is a way of continually developing. For professional development in academic teaching, Fanghanel (2013) argues that it is important to consider process, and that SoTL offers a powerful tool for using inquiry to support and bring about change. 

In this section, we will use the idea of developing expertise to look more closely at how you can actually use SoTL for your own development. 

 

Fanghanel, J. (2013). Going public with pedagogical inquiries: SoTL as a methodology for faculty professional development. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 59–70.
Open access: https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.1.1.59 Links to an external site.

Kreber, C. (2002). Teaching Excellence, Teaching Expertise, and the Scholarship of Teaching. Innovative Higher Education, 27(1), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020464222360 Links to an external site.