Before completing this reflection task, you might find it useful to review the following pages from the introduction:

The Lund model of pedagogical competence
The teaching portfolio

Doing SoTL can mean you investigate an aspect of teaching and learning with the intention of sharing your findings with colleagues, either locally or more broadly. But it can also mean carrying out an investigation that will help you develop an aspect of your own teaching practice that you want to improve, or that will help you document an aspect of your practice that works well and gain a better understanding of why it works well.

Start with what questions you have
Write down some aspects of your teaching practice that you would like to know more about or look more closely at. If you have started thinking about your overall pedagogical competence and/or begun building a teaching portfolio, review what you've got so far and note any easily visible gaps or areas where you would like to develop.

Based on this initial reflection, try to formulate a few questions about your own teaching practice. These could be questions related to improving something, gaining a better understanding of it, or finding a better way to document it.

Consider what you need to do to answer one of your questions
Pick one question. What sort of answer would you like to get? To get this answer, what would you need to do and what resources would you need? Who do you know that could help you with getting your answer? Are there different people who might offer support or advice or perhaps even be interested in collaborating with you?

You might find it helpful to review your work from the other modules in this learning resource as you do this task. If you haven't looked at the other modules yet, come back to this task as you work through them.

Look forward
Look at you calendar for the next six months. How much time could you devote to working on an answer for one of your questions? How often can you work on this? Can you integrate your work into your existing teaching? Would it be better to divide up the work into different stages, depending on your question and what your schedule looks like?

Sketch a plan for what you could do over the next six months to start finding an answer to one of your questions.

This is a general approach you can take at regular intervals. We encourage you to see your development as an ongoing process, and suggest you consider having a personal SoTL project on the go, even if it is just in the periphery, most of the time. Keep an eye out for opportunities to gather material you could use to study your teaching and your students' learning. You may not be able to do anything with a particular set of material immediately, but you might find time in the not-too-distant future. Even knowing you have collected some material can prompt you to reflect on it subconsciously, which could lead to an idea.