FPLC Scholarly Teaching and SoTL
From CTLpedia
Supporting Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the FPLC Program Brad Kincaid, Director, FPLC Program and Life Science Faculty, Mesa Community College, Contact me (mailto:kincaid@mail.mc.maricopa.edu).
Contents |
Program Goals and Objectives
MCC aspires to support employee professional development in order to advance the college as a learning organization.
At MCC, our number one strategic goal is to promote excellence in teaching and learning. We define teaching and learning broadly to include all activities and processes that promote the success of our students from the classroom experience to student activities and from recruiting to graduation. In all these aspects, we expect that as an academic institution we will take a scholarly approach and where ever possible adopt the best practices for promoting student success.
One way we will do this is by encouraging and supporting employees in the pursuit of scholarly activities including scholarly teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning and scholarly work within the disciplines.
What is Scholarly Teaching?
According to Laurie Richlin (2001) and others scholarly teaching is defined as ... Handelsman et al. (2004) called this scientific teaching, which is based on "teaching methods that have been systematically tested and shown to reach diverse students." With either definition, promoting the success of our students requires an awareness of methods that are most effective for students in our disciplines. Fortunately, most professional societies have developed discipline-specific education journals or other forums for sharing these pedagogies.
What is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?
The scholarship of teaching and learning involves making contributions to the knowledge base of effective teaching practices. This involves conducting systematic investigations of alternate approaches, subjecting them to peer review, and making those results public for use by all. Schulman (2000) once made a good analogy between teaching and medicine. A scholarly teacher is like a doctor who uses evidence-based procedures available in the medical literature to deliver the best medical care that he or she can, whereas someone who conducts the scholarship of teaching and learning is like a medical scientist who practices medicine and conducts medical research, which is published in medical journals. Maybe the scholarship of teaching and learning should actually be the science of teaching and learning?
Thus, the scholarship of teaching and learning differs from scholarly teaching mostly in two aspects: the evidence used to assess learning and in how the work is made public.
Whereas all faculty should do scholarly teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning is just one of many ways faculty can fulfill the professional expectations for all faculty. Certainly MCC strives to recognize scholarly teaching as well as the contributions of faculty who are engaging in advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning. So we will support scholarly teaching for all and help more faculty be successful with the scholarship of teaching and learning.
SOTL Support Programs
SOTL Consultation
One of the primary means for supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning at MCC will be through consultation with faculty on projects. Ideally, this consultation will occur early in the planning stages to have maximum impact. The FPLC Director, Faciliators, and athe CTL staff have extensive experience with instructional design, instructional technology, pedagogical problem-solving, and educational research skills. This staff allows us to provide classroom research design consultation that is so critical to successful scholarship of teaching and learning. Research consultation will also include survey, focus group, or qualitative data collection designs. In addition, we have improved our ability to consult on statistical analysis of assessment data.
A component of this support effort will include help with grants development for local, district or national projects (in cooperation with the Office of Research and Planning) and with other administrative details like Institutional Research Board clearance. Finally, we will even provide editorial and design consultation for presentation and publication.
SOTL Travel Support for FPLC Projects
The FPLC program has some funds for travel to present at conferences. Guidelines and application information are available here.
SOTL Resources
Research Library Access
Access to the literature is necessary for any scholarly research. The MCC Library has a reasonable collection of teaching and learning resources, and the CTL has some great books and journals. In addition, several FPLC staff can help with literature searches in the ASU library including full-text downloads of digital publications. We are working with ASU through the ASU-Maricopa Alliance to extend this ability to all MCC faculty who are engaged in scholarly research.
Institutional Research Data
The Office of Research and Planning is an invaluable resource for SOTL research. The ORP staff will assist faculty in accessing these data.
Computing Resources
The CTL maintains computing resources to support SOTL research. In particular, they have SPSS licenses for statistical analysis as well as HyperResearch for qualitative data analysis. In addition, the CTL maintains the CTLpedia website.
SOTL Collaboration
Collaboration can greatly facilitate SOTL research. This may be especially true for community college faculty who tend to have greater teaching loads than other sectors of higher education. Moreover, in all sectors of higher education, collaboration can enhance the sustainability of innovations in teaching and learning. For these reasons, we are strongly encouraging collaboration through our Faculty and Professional Learning Communities Program, which fosters local interdisciplinary interaction.
We are also encouraging other forms of collaboration. We can benefit from collaboration with our sister Maricopa Community Colleges and the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction. We also need to increase our vertical educational connections with local K-12 faculty and students and university partners. We especially need to cooperate and collaborate with ASU.
SOTL Communication
Making our innovations and conclusions public is a key component of SOTL. It is through communication of our work that we subject it to the peer review and criticism that is the hallmark of scholarship. We will promote and support communication at a variety of levels from local to national presentation and publication.
SOTL Local Publication
We will encourage local publication of all teaching and learning projects in the CTLpedia. This is a requirement for all Faculty and Professional Learning Communities and will be promoted for all other local and district grants and projects.
CTL Faculty Scholars Seminar Series
The Center for Teaching and Learning will sponsor a monthly seminar series each year. They solicit presentations from the Mesa faculty, both residential and adjunct. Potential presenters include faculty who have recently taken a sabbatical, received a fellowship or an advanced degree, or completed a college or district funded project. Presentations may be on any subject including teaching and learning, disciplinary research, or educational policy. They especially seek presentations that might stimulate discussion among faculty or promote reflection on our practice of teaching and learning.
Proposals for seminars are continuously being accepted. Please contact Jonelle Moore or Naomi Story to discuss your seminar proposal or to nominate someone to give a seminar. More information about the Seminar is available here. The 2006-7 Faculty Scholars Seminar Schedule is available here.
Annual MCC conference on Teaching and Learning
The FPLC program and the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs sponsors an annual conference on teaching and learning in August during the week before the fall semester. The core of this conference will be presentation of the work of the Faculty and Professional Learning Communities. In addition, Kaleidoscope Project participants and other teaching and learning grant awardees are encouraged to share their work.
More information is available here.
References
Bass, Randall. "The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?" Inventio, vol. 1, no. 1 http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/Archives/feb98/rbass.htm
Bernstein, Dan and Randy Bass. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Academe, July-August, 2005 http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05ja/05jabass.htm
Bernstein, Daniel, and Ellen Wert. "Making Visible the Intellectual Work in Teaching." Tomorrow's Professor Listserv, message #554 http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/postings/554.html
Boyer, Ernest L. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990.
Handelsman, J., D. Ebert-May, R. Beichner, P. Bruns, A. Chang, R. DeHaan, J. Gentile, S. Lauffer, J. Stewart, S. M. Tilghman, W. B. Wood. 2004. Scientific Teaching. Science 23 April 2004: Vol. 304. no. 5670, pp. 521 - 522 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/304/5670/521/DC1
Richlin, Laurie. 2001. Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching. Ch. 5 in Scholarship Revisited: Perspectives on the Scholarship of Teaching, Carolin Kreber, Ed. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 86, summer 2001. Jossey-Bass Publ.
Shulman, 2000. From Minsk to Pinsk:
Categories: CTL Projects | FPLC | 2007-8 | FPLC Program
