Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is the systematic inquiry into teaching and learning that is distributed publicly through professional outlets (e.g., journals, conferences, symposia).

A vital distinction of SoTL from other forms of scholarship is that SoTL goes beyond good teaching and requires ”going public” or sharing of the results.

Benefits to Students

• Fosters quality instruction
• SoTL demonstrates learning on a public scale

Benefits to Faculty

• Informs faculty on their practice
• Career outcomes
• Opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaborations
• Closely aligns teaching and research activities

Benefits to Institutions

• Demonstrates commitment to quality instruction and research productivity

The process and products of Sotl provide value to many stakeholders.

• Faculty
  SoTL provides an opportunity to reflect on teaching, make improvements and changes, and determine the success of their approaches. SoTL closely aligns teaching and research activity for faculty and fosters unique opportunities to work with inter-disciplinary colleagues and methods.
• Students
  Students benefit as both participants in SoTL projects as well as learners in courses in which instructors reflect on the teaching and learning process.
• Institutions
  Institutions of higher education can share evidence of high- quality learning and provides an opportunity for faculty to prosper and create new knowledge.

Iowa State is unique because SoTL is codified as research productivity, and thus counts toward promotion and tenure, in the ISU Faculty Handbook.

Since 2010, nearly half of those who successfully seek promotion and tenure include  at  least one SoTL artifact (Gansemer-Topf et al., 2022; Marcketti & Freeman, 2016)