Three Keys of SoTL

A response to the Three Keys of SoTL Activity
created by Ivan Chow (@chowivan)

Number of views: 250

Ivan Chow October 1, 2021

The three key characteristics of SoTL that resonate with your professional experience and practice are:

  1. SoTL is a formal and systematic way of reflecting upon my own teaching practise: what are the things that worked? What didn’t work? As Randy Bass mentioned, it is about repeating this cycle every time I teach, documenting the reflection, gathering evidence, making this reflection public so that others can build upon this knowledge.
  2. As elaborated eloquently by Nancy Chick, SoTL is about answering questions about our own teaching practice. However, the research methodology (e.g. how we gather evidence and how we frame the research question) is dictated not only by the question itself but by the researcher’s own expertise. In so doing, the researcher’s own perspective on the question adds to the rich mosaic of SoTL research as more information is shared on converging topics.
  3. As Tony Ciccone mentions, SoTL is a perspective, a practice, a product and something that impacts. This resonates with my own teaching because 1) it motivates me to observe my own teaching and identify what works and what doesn’t. 2) It inspires me to think about ways to gather evidence, more specifically, to think about how to mitigate confounding factors and how to draw sound conclusions/implications from my data. 3) to me, “product” is an analogy to framing my question and answer and presenting it to the scholarly community. 4) this mental exercise has an impact on how I finetune my teaching practice in the future.