Formulating Your Scholarship of Learning and Teaching Question

Formulating Your Scholarship of Learning and Teaching Question Marcel D’Eon College of Medicine September 26, 2011

Why learning and teaching, and why scholarship? Learning is the main or central purpose of teaching. Teaching supports and encourages and directs learning. Teaching is complex, intellectually and emotionally challenging, and very rewarding. We can all do better.

Session outcomes Describe So. TL, the context for research Identify areas from your own teaching practice for exploration and scholarly inquiry Begin to develop a question or two Willingly and enthusiastically participate in more workshops in this series Meet and begin to work with other keener teachers

An authoritative definition? SOTL is scholarly inquiry into student learning which advances the practice of teaching by sharing this research publicly

ISSo. TL The goal of the Society is to foster inquiry and disseminate findings about what improves and articulates post-secondary learning and teaching.

Let’s read Brad’s version… Compare and contrast with the other definitions Where are you now, where did you come from, and where are you going in terms of So. TL?

Getting Started Teachers consider their own knowledge and practice through inquiry and critical reflection What is going wrong? What could be going better? How do I address those challenge(s)? How do I know that I have the answer? Continuous improvement (QI, action research, etc…. )

Scholarly inquiry… Research methods: ◦ ◦ ◦ Reflection and analysis Interviews and focus groups Questionnaires and surveys Quasi-experiments and even RCTs Repeated inquiry (action research…) Dissemination might include: ◦ Local events like journal clubs, poster sessions ◦ Conference presentations and posters ◦ Newsletters and peer reviewed publications

Critical reflection Not the same as validating current practice Asking hard questions about your practice Asking good questions about learning Useful to have a “critical friend” and or mentor

Taxonomy of Questions What is it? Description Does it work? How do we know? Statistical significance How well does it work and is it worth the effort? Effect size Does it work better than conventional approaches? Experiments Does it work better than other good practices? More experiments What is it that makes it work? Transferability

Various levels of evidence Kirkpartick’s taxonomy! Satisfaction: they like it better Learning: they picked something up (K, S, A) Performance: they used it at work, in the field Impact: it made a difference in quality of the work….

Try it on for size Think of a challenge or issue in your teaching that you might want to address. Formulate a question in the middle of the taxonomy. What could you do to find the answer to this question? Exchange some of your ideas with the people next to you.

Many thanks! See you again soon!