Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Teaching is both an art as well as science.

Effective teaching would require engaged teaching. It goes beyond execution of teaching activities to reflecting about teaching practices, exploring/experimenting and determining effective ways of teaching. While good teachers are naturally engaged in this process of reflection and continual improvement, some may remain comfortable with this.
 
Some others would go on to discussing with their colleagues, or refer to blogs or journals on effective teaching practices and attempt adaptation to their context. This is sometimes known as “scholarly teaching” – that is informed teaching. While this is great, the outcomes tend to stop at implementation often. Instructors learn from others and do a great job but this remains with them.
 
Learning Sciences Lab will like to encourage going an additional extra mile to evaluate these informed teaching practices, and to possibly document these practices to share amongst SUTD colleagues, and/or share with wider community of teaching practitioners to enhance teaching and learning in general.
 
Sharing of such empirical evidence based teaching and learning practices is known as “Scholarship of teaching and learning”. The objective of SOTL is to enhance teaching and learning practices, taking an empirical approach. It should be noted that SOTL is not about publishing for publication sake. The advantage of SOTL is that it goes beyond individual researchers to creating a community of practitioners at SUTD and has the potential to result in a university-wide enhancement of teaching and learning. This also has a meaningful impact on the society in general.

The following picture depicts the three key characteristics of SOTL. 
 


 

For more details on SOTL, find out more at our LSL blog.