Key Points from the Keynote
Pat Hutchings, Vice-President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching offered an informative overview of the scope, focus and accomplishments of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning initiative in this year's keynote address at the Middlesex Carnegie Summer Institute. In particular she highlighted the following SoTL key ideas:
- Teaching is (hard) intellectual work
- It poses interesting questions about learning that invite inquiry and investigation
- We owe it to ourselves and our students to share the results of our investigations
- No enterprise can improve without mechanisms for collective learning
Hutchings noted that a number of positive lessons and accomplishments have resulted from SoTL initiatives including greater recognition and reward for teaching, professional accountability (greater SoTL presence in the accreditation process), and improved student learning.
Looking forward, one key goal is to create a sharing of ideas and resources through a "Teaching Common," which may include communities such as campus teaching circles, the educational research community, discipline based communities, organizations such as ISSOTL (International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) and electronic portfolios.