The first step in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) typically begins with an idea for helping students. One of NYU’s longest SoTL projects, for example, began with Dentistry faculty asking a simple question: Could we teach dental students to administer local anesthesia without them giving each other injections?
According to Randy Bass’s “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?” identifying an educational gap should not be seen as something to be fixed, but rather as a topic for continuous investigation, analysis, representation, and discussion with a scholarly community. He explains:
“In scholarship and research, having a ‘problem’ is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a ‘problem’ is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation. Changing the status of the problem in teaching from terminal remediation to ongoing investigation is precisely what the movement for a scholarship of teaching is all about. How might we make the problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse? How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated?” (Bass, 1999)
Some key aspects of choosing your “problem” can include:
- Is it meaningful and significant to you?
- Is the problem causing ineffective learning?
- Is it possible to research with the time, resources, and students you have?
- Is it deliberate, narrow, and focused, so that your project will adequately answer your research question?
*Adapted from Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning’s SoTL Guide (page currently under construction)
References:
Bass, R. (1998). The Scholarship of Teaching : What’s the Problem?. Inventio, 1(1).