1. Marcel D’Eon College of Medicine September 26, 2011

2.  Learning is the main or central purpose of teaching.  Teaching supports and encourages and directs learning.  Teaching is complex, intellectually and emotionally challenging, and very rewarding.  We can all do better.

3.  Describe SoTL, the context for research  Identify areas from your own teaching practice for exploration and scholarly inquiry  Begin to develop a question or two  Willingly and enthusiastically participate in more workshops in this series  Meet and begin to work with other keener teachers

4. SOTL is scholarly inquiry into student learning which advances the practice of teaching by sharing this research publicly

5. The goal of the Society is to foster inquiry and disseminate findings about what improves and articulates post-secondary learning and teaching.

6.  Compare and contrast with the other definitions  Where are you now, where did you come from, and where are you going in terms of SoTL?

7.  Teachers consider their own knowledge and practice through inquiry and critical reflection  What is going wrong?  What could be going better?  How do I address those challenge(s)?  How do I know that I have the answer?  Continuous improvement (QI, action research, etc….)

8.  Research methods: ◦ Reflection and analysis ◦ Interviews and focus groups ◦ Questionnaires and surveys ◦ Quasi-experiments and even RCTs ◦ Repeated inquiry (action research…)  Dissemination might include: ◦ Local events like journal clubs, poster sessions ◦ Conference presentations and posters ◦ Newsletters and peer reviewed publications

9.  Not the same as validating current practice  Asking hard questions about your practice  Asking good questions about learning  Useful to have a “critical friend” and or mentor

10.  What is it?  Does it work? How do we know?  How well does it work and is it worth the effort?  Does it work better than conventional approaches?  Does it work better than other good practices?  What is it that makes it work? Description Statistical significance Effect size Experiments More experiments Transferability

11. Kirkpartick’s taxonomy!  Satisfaction: they like it better  Learning: they picked something up (K, S, A)  Performance: they used it at work, in the field  Impact: it made a difference in quality of the work….

12.  Think of a challenge or issue in your teaching that you might want to address.  Formulate a question in the middle of the taxonomy.  What could you do to find the answer to this question?  Exchange some of your ideas with the people next to you.

13. See you again soon!