What is SoTL?

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a scholarly tradition that involves instructors systematically investigating their own teaching, and especially its effects on their students’ learning. Because a wide diversity of work ends up falling under the SoTL banner, no precise definition of SoTL – one that puts a finer point on “systematically investigating” – is likely to satisfy all who participate in this field. It may be helpful, however, to think of SoTL as being research – specifically, research in which the investigator is the instructor, the subjects are the students, and the research focus is students’ learning (or other instructional outcomes). But note that many practitioners in this tradition emphasize the importance of maintaining an inclusive definition of research (see, for example, Chick 2013) such that many different modes of inquiry count as SoTL, provided that reflective teaching practice is at the core of the work. As such, SoTL consists in practice of work ranging from narrative reflections on the effects of one’s teaching practices, shared locally, to full-scale research projects published in peer-reviewed journals