Chip, Joanne, and I are spending a blustery fall break in Québec City connecting with the SoTL community for the 14th annual International Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference (ISSOTL 14).  We’re excited to be sharing some of the things we’ve learned from the VIPEr community and workshops with this broader education and faculty development audience.   For me, though this conference is also about dipping my toes a little deeper into the waters of SoTL.  

While reflective teaching is something that I, like many of you, can relate to, I am very new to the idea of SoTL as professional practice (one of the areas in Boyer’s 1990 Scholarship Reconsidered). I initially struggled with all the edu-speak in the field (formative, criterion referenced, qualitative rubrics anyone?).   One of the main lessons that I learned at my first SoTL conference is that starting small is OK and that you can start with a single question about what the students in your classes are learning.  One barrier that many new to the area perceive is that every study needs 200 students and a control.   These parameters are not practical for those of us teaching small upper level classes (sometimes only every other year). As a noob, it is helpful to be able to see the many forms of that SoTL can take, all in one place!  

Because I am teaching a First Year Seminar this semester, I spent a lot of time at this meeting at panels related to writing and general education.  One particularly interesting presentation that I saw analyzed the “moves” students make in pre-discussion writing (and what about their responses make a “good” response).   The speaker showed that exemplary students make more connections between things they’ve read and previous knowledge instead of just “echoing” the text.  Another panel proposed ways to think about doing new research on “threshold concepts” (such as metacognition, applying knowledge to new situations, and the idea of disciplinarity) across the disciplines.  

One of the plenary speakers, Georges Bordage, a faculty member and educational researcher at the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, shared the reasons that teaching practitioners should have a productive two way exchange with education psychologists who study the cognitive process.  The teachers get best practices from the current educational psychology literature, but then do studies that push against the boundaries of that knowledge to further advance the field of educational psychology. He posited that we should make every attempt to improve our teaching count twice: as both a scholarly act (supported by literature) and an act of scholarship that will advance our collective understanding of learning.   VIPEr can perhaps serve as a catalyst for some of these kinds of conversations in the field of inorganic chemistry.           

For those looking to dip your toes in the waters of SoTL, here are several useful articles below that can serve as a good introduction to the field:   

“Principles of Good Practice in SoTL” Peter Felten, Teaching & Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2013, 121-125.

Opening Lines: Approaches to the scholarship of Teaching and Learning, P. Hutchings (Ed.),  (2000). Opening lines: approaches to the scholarship of teaching and learning, Menlo Park, CA: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

“An Apology for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” Jaqueline Dewar, Insight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, Vol 3, 2008, 17-22.

Finally, another conference that I found to be super friendly to newcomers is the SoTL Commons conference, held every March in Savannah, GA—a possible spring break opportunity, particularly you looking for something a bit more balmy than the Denver ACS Meeting!  The abstract deadline for that conference is coming up Nov 15.  

Do you have any SoTL projects you are working on?   Are there big SoTL questions in inorganic chemistry that the ViPEr community could help tackle as a group?   Add your thoughts below!