{"id":10082,"date":"2012-06-05t09:00:10","date_gmt":"2012-06-05t15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=10082"},"modified":"2013-03-29t09:28:12","modified_gmt":"2013-03-29t14:28:12","slug":"sotl-spotlight-whats-in-it-for-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2012\/06\/sotl-spotlight-whats-in-it-for-me\/","title":{"rendered":"sotl spotlight: what’s in it for me?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n <\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n by nancy chick, cft assistant director<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n nancy <\/a>is the\u00a0author<\/a><\/em> <\/em>of a variety of sotl articles and book chapters, as well as\u00a0co-editor<\/a><\/em> <\/em>of two books on signature pedagogies and co-editor of <\/em>teaching & learning inquiry<\/a>, the official journal of\u00a0the international society for the scholarship<\/em> <\/em>of teaching and learning (issotl<\/a>).<\/em> “sotl spotlight” is her ongoing feature on the cft website.<\/em><\/p>\n in my last \u201csotl spotlight,\u201d<\/a> i mentioned harvard university\u2019s new $40 million grant dedicated to teaching and learning initiatives, including a symposium, a consortium, some classroom redesign, and a grant program for projects to improve teaching and learning on campus. over 250 proposals were submitted for review, and 47 projects were awarded grants for $5,000 to $50,000 (2012-2013).\u00a0 the guiding principles for the projects were that they should be innovative, to \u201cenable new educational practices and policies\u201d; evidence-based, rather than \u201cdependent solely on intuition or anecdote\u201d; and extendable with products of some type that are \u201cworth sharing, \u2026 to build community around evidence-based learning and teaching\u201d (\u201charvard\u201d). without using the term, harvard is putting a significant amount of money behind the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl).<\/p>\n such grants are effective extrinsic motivators to do evidence-based research on teaching and learning. in my previous university system, programs like harvard\u2019s were widespread, although on a smaller scale.\u00a0 even with less funding, a ripple effect was visible: a little support for one\u2019s time, the help of an assistant, or the ability to bring groups together for a day or two went a long way toward shifting the culture of the institution away from one that primarily supports research and \u201cprovide[s] instruction,\u201d toward one that also \u201cexists to produce learning<\/em>\u201d (barr and tagg).\u00a0 even colleagues who weren\u2019t funded were affected because they saw the institution, its administration, and more and more peers validating this work.<\/p>\n however, i\u2019m reminded of the limits of extrinsic motivation. if the external motivator is removed\u2014by budgetary constraints, for instance\u2014will the work continue? that remains to be seen at my former institution.\u00a0 i hope so.<\/a><\/p>\n it\u2019s an important question, though, especially for campuses like vanderbilt, where there is no such grant program, large or small.\u00a0 what are the motivators for us to improve teaching and learning in systematic ways? \u00a0why\u2014amid all of the demands of the profession\u2014would vanderbilt faculty do this kind of research in their classrooms, take the time to subject it to peer review, and share it widely, as they do with their disciplinary work?\u00a0 why would they do work outside of their disciplinary expertise and the primary requirements of the job?<\/p>\n there are institution-specific surveys on such questions, but i\u2019m more interested in the findings from a broader survey of faculty from a variety of fields, ranks, and institutions (cox, huber, and hutchings 133-141).\u00a0 when asked why they originally got involved in this work, faculty (the majority of whom were from doctoral-level campuses) cited the following as the most important reasons:<\/p>\n more interestingly, when asked about the consequences of being involved in sotl, they claim to have<\/p>\n the list goes on.<\/p>\n at vanderbilt, though, what motivates those doing this work?\u00a0 when i sat down with assistant professor\u00a0tom\u00a0christenbery<\/a> (school of nursing), his enthusiasm about his projects kept bringing me back to this question.<\/p>\n it started with vanderbilt\u2019s early adoption of the doctorate in nursing practice (dnp).\u00a0 although he started\u00a0teaching in\u00a01989 and arrived at vanderbilt in 1998, he spoke of the six-year-old dnp program with great energy: \u201cthere are just so many areas to be addressed, and that\u2019s exciting\u201d (christenbery, personal interview).\u00a0 as a young program\u00a0that\u2019s now widespread across the country, its most effective teaching and learning practices are \u201cwide open\u201d for \u201cpioneering\u201d work like his.<\/p>\n for example, dnp students frequently have to make schematic models (similar to concept maps<\/a>) of the theories they\u2019re learning, \u201cvisually represent[ing] a theory\u2019s concepts and the interrelationships among those concepts\u201d (christenbery, \u201cbuilding\u201d 250). \u00a0a colleague who teaches the course sequenced after his mentioned that the students struggle with this task, \u201cso that got me thinking,\u201d he said. \u201ci went to the textbook, and there was lots of information on how to critique<\/em> a model or a theory, but nothing on actually how you go about creating<\/em> a model.\u201d with no resources to help students learn this fundamental activity in the textbook, in the literature, or within the dnp program, tom and colleagues developed a project guiding students through the parsing of a theory to represent it visually, documented in his article in nurse educator<\/em>.<\/p>\n he responded similarly to the realization that dnp students (like students everywhere) find synthesis difficult, specifically synthesizing the literature on a given topic. \u00a0add to this challenge a fast-tracked or shortened semester for these students, and they struggle even more. \u00a0again, this problem led to an epiphany, which led to action: \u201cevery program requires students to synthesize the literature, but what are you doing to teach them how<\/em>, instead of saying, \u2018go synthesize?\u2019\u201d \u00a0he and a colleague went to vanderbilt\u2019s writing studio to find out more about the teaching this higher-level skill, and they developed a workshop for students\u2014and then a manuscript for publication, sharing their solution with disciplinary colleagues facing the same challenge.<\/p>\n his explanation for why he took the extra effort to develop a response to the students\u2019 struggle\u2014and then share it within his field\u2014is telling:\u00a0 \u201cthat\u2019s something that inspires me:\u00a0 when i see something that we\u2019re expecting people to do but we just haven\u2019t given them the tools to do it, or we\u2019re expecting them to do it in a new way because they\u2019re under different time constraints than the old model, so i want to find out what\u2019s the best way to do it under the new model.\u201d<\/p>\n the problem-epiphany-action cycle played out again with a project to help the students understand and practice peer review more effectively (christenbery, \u201cmanuscript\u201d), which led to a major nursing organization using his template to guide their journal\u2019s peer review.\u00a0 from classroom to the larger field, \u201cthere\u2019s an impact factor here,\u201d he explains. \u201ci was so thrilled that it had some application, that someone read it and said, \u2018this is what we need because it works.\u2019\u201d clear evidence that he\u2019s contributing to his field is a powerful motivator.\u00a0 he says it affirms that his work is \u201cmeaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n i asked him how this work has affected his teaching, a more local impact.\u00a0 \u201cit makes me more sensitive to the learning needs of the students, the fundamental things,\u201d he observes.\u00a0 \u201cit keeps my radar tuned in.\u201d<\/p>\n listening to him talk, i heard many of the motivators from that broad survey emerging: questions he wanted to explore, finding collaborators interested in similar questions, and connections to larger bodies of work.\u00a0 i also heard effects similar to those in the survey, such as creating new assessments, changing expectations for his students\u2019 learning, seeing the quality of his students\u2019 learning evolve, and most clearly becoming more excited about his teaching.<\/p>\n he ended our conversation with something i hadn\u2019t heard so explicitly before, but which resonated with what i’ve seen time and time again with faculty doing sotl:\u00a0 rather than seeing this research as outside of his disciplinary expertise and the primary requirements of his job, he suggests that this work has an energizing and joyful effect:\u00a0 \u201cyour brain feels different after you\u2019ve done it. i enjoy the thinking that comes along with it.\u201d \u00a0this consequence, while intangible, is a powerful one.<\/p>\n works cited<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n by nancy chick, cft assistant director nancy is the\u00a0author of a variety of sotl articles and book chapters, as well as\u00a0co-editor of two books on signature pedagogies and co-editor of teaching & learning inquiry, the official journal of\u00a0the international society for the scholarship of teaching and learning (issotl). “sotl spotlight” is her ongoing feature on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":452,"featured_media":9395,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,186],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wp0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/59\/2018\/07\/09154121\/sotl-spotlight.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10082"}],"collection":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/452"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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