The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered E-Book

Pat Hutchings

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: JB-Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 420

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Praise for The Scholarship of Teaching and LearningReconsidered "A worthy capstone that pulls together two decades of CarnegieFoundation projects on the scholarship of teaching and learning.The authors review the genesis of these ideas and envision a futureof continued integration of a culture of evidence in the world'suniversities and colleges. Projects end but the workcontinues." --Lee S. Shulman, president emeritus, The CarnegieFoundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Charles E. DucommunProfessor of Education emeritus, Stanford University "This book captures the most important lessons from a decade ofthoughtful experimentation with methods to improve the learningoutcomes of American college students. The authors have deepexperience in institutionalizing various approaches that have beendevised and endorsed by faculty in many kinds of higher educationsettings. It will be a manual for those seeking to improve theirown teaching and learning outcomes." --Katharine Lyall, president emerita, University ofWisconsin System "The authors recount the history of research into one's ownteaching, further develop its conceptualization, and makerecommendations for how to bring it into the mainstream.Collectively, they have been at the center of the movement and havewritten, spoken, strategized, and organized conversations andscholarly work on the topic for many years. They present richexamples from many different environments and an unwavering visionof the benefits of the scholarship of teaching and learning and itspotential." --Nancy Chism, Indiana University School of Education,Indianapolis "This book reframes the literature on the scholarship ofteaching and learning, faculty development, assessment, and thefuture of higher education. The writing sparkles with freshanalysis on teaching, learning, academic culture, and thepossibilities for change. This book will help both individualfaculty and entire institutions to enhance scholarly teaching andto deepen student learning." --Peter Felten, assistant provost and director, Centerfor the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and associateprofessor of history, Elon University

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Series

Preface

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About The Authors

Executive Summary

Chapter One: Why the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Matters Today

THE TURN TOWARD LEARNING

LOOKING CLOSELY AND CRITICALLY AT LEARNING

AREAS OF IMPACT, PROMISE, AND CHALLENGE

EVIDENCE AND VOICE

ENGAGING INSTITUTIONAL AGENDAS

Chapter Two: Teachers and Learning

WEBS OF CHANGE

AN APPETITE FOR (RICHER) EVIDENCE

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

THE LEARNING QUESTION

GETTING BETTER

Chapter Three: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Professional Growth, and Faculty Development

COMPETING NARRATIVES

DIFFERENT BUT CONVERGING HISTORIES

LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER

MODELS TO LEAD THE WAY

WHAT IT MEANS—AND TAKES—TO DEVELOP TEACHERS TODAY

Chapter Four: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Meets Assessment

BUILDING BRIDGES

AN ETHIC OF INQUIRY

LOCATION, LOCATION

ACCOUNTABILITY

Chapter Five: Valuing—and Evaluating—Teaching

THE NEW SCHOLARSHIPS ENTER FACULTY EVALUATION

THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING AS “RESEARCH”

THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING AS “TEACHING”

CHANGING THE CULTURE OF TEACHING

Chapter Six: Getting There: Leadership for the Future

ONE VISION OF THE POSSIBLE

LESSONS FOR LEADERS

THE FUTURE OF THE PROFESSORIATE

Appendix A: Exploring Impact

IMPACT ON FACULTY AS TEACHERS

IMPACT ON THE STUDENT LEARNING EXPERIENCE

IMPACT ON THE INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE OF TEACHING

IMPACT ON DEPARTMENT OR PROGRAM INITIATIVES

IMPACT ON SCHOOL/COLLEGE OR CAMPUSWIDE INITIATIVES

IMPROVEMENTS IN STUDENT LEARNING

USING TECHNOLOGY

LESSONS USEFUL TO OTHERS

SIGNS OF PROGRESS

ANTICIPATED NEXT STEPS

ISSUES FOR THE MOVEMENT'S FUTURE

SUMMARY OF QUANTITATIVE RESPONSES

EXPLORING IMPACT: THE SURVEY INSTRUMENT

Appendix B: The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

CASTL Scholars

The Scholarly and Professional Societies Program

The Campus Program

Appendix C: Looking Back from 2030

SCENARIO ONE

SCENARIO TWO

SCENARIO THREE

SCENARIO FOUR

References

Name Index

Subject Index

Copyright © 2011 by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 51 Vista Lane, Stanford, California 94305. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hutchings, Pat. The scholarship of teaching and learning reconsidered : institutional integration and impact / Pat Hutchings, Mary Taylor Huber, Anthony Ciccone. p. cm. – (The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-59908-2 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-118-07552-4 (ebk.) ISBN 978-1-118-07553-1 (ebk.) ISBN 978-1-118-07555-5 (ebk.) 1. Education, Higher–Study and teaching–United States. 2. Professional learning communities–United States. I. Huber, Mary Taylor, 1944– II. Ciccone, Anthony. III. Title. LB2331.H88 2011 378.73–dc23 2011015807

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

PREFACE

The world of teaching and learning in higher education has become a lively place. Over the past twenty-five years, a shift in focus from teaching toward learning has energized a reform movement that is engaging large numbers of educators across academic ranks and roles. What was once a sleepy pedagogical backwater is now a buzzing hive of initiatives to improve the learning experience for college students, to increase their rate of completion, and to raise their level of achievement. Problems that were once the province of isolated pedagogical specialists are increasingly the shared concern of all who teach in higher education. And the language of learning, once a foreign tongue to most academics, has become more widely spoken and more deeply understood.

In short, a rather extraordinary development is under way: the emergence in higher education of a teaching commons, where “communities of educators committed to pedagogical inquiry and innovation come together to exchange ideas about teaching and learning, and use them to meet the challenges of educating students” (Huber and Hutchings, 2005, p. x).

In The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons, two of us explored how a growing stream of faculty members had begun to engage with this commons through the scholarship of teaching and learning (Huber and Hutchings, 2005). We documented the history of this approach to teaching and identified its defining features: asking questions about one’s students’ learning; gathering and analyzing evidence to help answer those questions; trying out and exploring new insights about learning in one’s teaching; and making what one has found public, so that it can be reviewed, critiqued, and built on by others. We mapped the contributions to knowledge that this generation of scholars of teaching and learning was making to the commons, the pathways that were bringing faculty into the work, the growth of the campus as a teaching commons, and the development of new networks and genres for knowledge building and exchange. Throughout, our interest was in how regular faculty were producing pedagogical knowledge and using it to improve student learning in their classrooms and fields.

In this book, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered, our focus is on the spread of the teaching commons to core areas of institutional work. We have chosen four sites where the coordination of individual and institutional priorities is progressively more challenging: classroom teaching, professional development, institutional assessment, and the recognition and reward of pedagogical work. Sites like these, where the interests of participants are often “substantially diverse,” are particularly important to theorists of the commons, who are interested in “factors affecting institutional design and the patterns of interaction occurring within action arenas” (Hess and Ostrom, 2007, p. 44). For us, these sites are important for an additional reason: they are key to bringing the scholarship of teaching and learning more fully into the mainstream of institutional life. Indeed, it is our view that the scholarship of teaching and learning should no longer be seen as a discrete project or special initiative, but rather as a set of principles and practices that are critical to achieving the institution’s goals for student learning and success.

Key to this vision of the work’s institutional possibilities is our conviction that the scholarship of teaching and learning provides an approach to educational design and problem solving that has promise far beyond individual classrooms. It’s possible for faculty to do this kind of work pretty much on their own, of course, relying on colleagues away from campus for conversation and feedback—and many scholars of teaching and learning do so. But working with others who share a local context is not only more efficient and pleasurable; it can also lead to the kind of collaborative inquiry and shared responsibility for student learning that is important for the design, assessment, and improvement of academic programs. Indeed, it’s hard to think of an academic function that couldn’t benefit from colleagues looking together for answers to questions like: Who are our students? What do we want them to learn? What opportunities do they need to learn these things? How can we coordinate and evaluate our efforts?

Another advantage of a more collective approach to the scholarship of teaching and learning follows closely from the first. A framework that brings people together through a cycle of inquiry and improvement can give everyone involved—faculty, staff, students—a clearer view of educational issues of common concern, and a stronger voice. The process of asking questions, drawing on literature, and seeking evidence fosters critical and creative engagement. It’s a way of involving a wider array of thoughtful people in setting the agenda for institutional work beyond particular classrooms or departments: for example, revisions to general education and honors programs, efforts to better integrate study abroad or service learning into the curriculum, or initiatives to raise levels of student retention and achievement. As the distinguished British educator Lewis Elton has argued, the scholarship of teaching and learning is not just about doing good things better (although that is very important); it’s also about doing better things (2000).

A third reason for bringing the scholarship of teaching and learning to bear on institutional agendas is its capacity to broaden and enrich what’s known about student learning on campus and to make it accessible for wider use. Many educators nodded their heads in assent when Derek Bok wrote in Our Underachieving Colleges (2006) about how little most institutions actually know about what and how much their students are learning. Bok was calling for more formal education research. But he also recognized that sound local knowledge—the special province of the scholarship of teaching and learning—could be even more important for the practical work that college and university educators do. As we argue in this book, the scholarship of teaching and learning can complement the efforts of institutional research and assessment, helping a campus build systematic knowledge about student learning in forms that can make a real difference to teachers and students in their everyday educational lives.

The reason why the scholarship of teaching and learning can make such a difference is its approach to teaching itself. Scholarship Reconsidered (Boyer, 1990) and Scholarship Assessed (Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff, 1997), two influential Carnegie Foundation reports, called for teaching to be practiced as serious intellectual work. What “serious intellectual work” means—how it can best be developed, supported, evaluated, recognized, and rewarded—has been the subject of lively debate ever since. But no one doubts that it means, at least, teaching with an informed and critical eye on one’s students’ learning. Teaching, in this view, takes into account theory, inquiry, and evidence about learning, and, like other intellectual pursuits, is enriched by participation in a wider community of people similarly engaged. It’s in the working groups, conferences, and other forums (face-to-face, print, and online) that comprise a campus’s own teaching commons that local knowledge about teaching and learning truly becomes “community property” (Shulman, 1993), as people share, critique, and build on insights from their own and others’ work.

This view of teaching, the intellectual work it entails, and the communities that these teachers form to grow and thrive are much needed in higher education today. The scholarship of teaching and learning brings important habits of inquiry, analysis, exchange, and knowledge building to the profession’s broader, and increasingly complex, challenges in educating students for tomorrow’s life and work. And though these challenges are most immediately experienced in the context of teaching particular things to particular students, there is growing recognition that the learning experience for students transcends those particulars. How are courses in a program connected to each other? Are there opportunities for students to connect their learning across different fields of study? Do students have opportunities for progressively more sophisticated development of widely agreed-upon liberal learning outcomes? There may always be some tension between the questions that engage the interests of individual faculty members and the educational priorities officially embraced by the institution. But with good leadership, attentive to the legitimacy of both, the scholarship of teaching and learning can be a transformative approach to addressing the difficult educational challenges colleges and universities face today.

As we note in this book, there are many arenas that need cultivation, attention, and support if the scholarship of teaching and learning is to reach its full potential. After an overview in Chapter 1, we look in Chapter 2 at the work in its home settings—in the classroom, among small groups of colleagues, and in the conferences and publications where it joins the larger teaching commons. Chapter 3 argues that faculty development programs can play an important role in bringing people together around shared educational agendas, in providing forums for making work public, and in creating networks across the institution, through which promising ideas about good practice can flow. In Chapter 4, we turn our attention to opportunities for building bridges between institutional assessment and the scholarship of teaching and learning, so that instead of occupying separate spheres, each can enrich the other. Chapter 5 looks at the significant, yet still uneven, progress that’s been made toward giving the intellectual work of teaching a more prominent place in systems of faculty roles and rewards—clearly an area where much remains to be done. Our final chapter explores what it will take to succeed and what success will look like when (not if!) it is achieved.

This book is addressed to campus leaders—presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs, boards of trustees, participants in campus governance, leaders of professional development, and the many faculty and staff who shape the institution’s work—and we hope it will answer their questions about the scholarship of teaching and learning, what it is, why it matters, and how it can help the campus community meet its core educational responsibilities. It is important to emphasize that making an institutional commitment to the scholarship of teaching and learning does not come without cost. Many faculty engaged in this work do so now out of a sense of curiosity about learning, a commitment to their students, and a new vision of what professionalism in teaching entails. But it cannot simply be an add-on to faculty’s already overloaded plates. Leadership for learning means recognizing that teaching well is a demanding intellectual task; it means budgeting for such work with time, recognition, reward, and support.

These are trying economic times for colleges and universities of all institutional types. We hope the arguments we make in this book will persuade campus leaders that supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning is a good investment, and that our account of the work’s impact and promise will help them see where and how it can make its greatest contributions. As the work of many individual scholars suggests, the scholarship of teaching and learning is already improving the learning experience for students in classrooms and courses. It is also beginning to make good on its promise to change the culture of teaching in higher education, enlarging the repertoire of what’s possible and desirable to do as a teacher, creating contexts for teaching that are more collaborative and collegial, and making the colleges and universities that support the scholarship of teaching and learning better places to work in and more worthy places to work for.

It is important to recognize that the scholarship of teaching and learning is not only a U.S. phenomenon. As the movement has grown, so too have connections between pedagogically engaged scholars around the world. This wider range of exchange and collaboration is what one would expect with the development of the teaching commons, of course. A growing set of international conferences, disciplinary interest groups, journals, speaking engagements, consultancies, and initiatives have enriched the professional lives of scholars of teaching and learning everywhere, and helped increase the circulation of pedagogical ideas across national boundaries.

But it is also true that the work has different histories in each country (or set of countries—as among the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which had long-standing habits of exchange), and that it unfolds in particular constellations of higher education institutions and policies. Each country’s system has unique features, but the U.S. system, with over 4,000 public and private accredited colleges and universities, including doctoral universities, master’s universities and colleges, baccalaureate colleges, and a huge community college sector, is still among the largest and most diverse national systems in the world. So this book, while drawing on literature and examples from colleagues and institutions abroad, focuses on the United States because it is concerned primarily with weaving the scholarship of teaching and learning into the institutional fabric of U.S. higher education. Of course we hope our international colleagues will find our analysis useful to their efforts in their own circumstances as well.

We hope too that readers will bear with us on our choice of terminology. Although many participants in the larger movement use “SoTL” as a convenient abbreviation in referring to the scholarship of teaching and learning, we will forego the acronym and use the longer phrase, or, when the antecedent is clear, refer to it simply as “this work.”

Finally, a word about the title of this book. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered deliberately echoes the title of Scholarship Reconsidered, the 1990 report by Ernest Boyer that launched the term “the scholarship of teaching” into the discourse of higher education in the United States. The two volumes are bookends, if you will, for two decades of effort by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to develop the idea, encourage the practice, and build leadership for the work. As we hope this book will show, it’s been an extraordinary endeavor, involving two Carnegie Foundation presidents (Boyer and his successor, Lee Shulman, who established the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—CASTL), a talented set of colleagues at “project central,” hundreds of faculty fellows, campus collaborators, and scholarly societies. The movement has, of course, gone far beyond the Carnegie circle itself—so far, in fact, that no one person or group can speak for all who use the term. This “reconsideration,” with an eye on the work’s transformation from individual initiative to institutional integration, is our own take on its current state and future prospects. So while The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered is a bookend to twenty years of Carnegie Foundation involvement, it is just a milestone on the journey its readers will take—to the next stage, the one after that, and the one after that, again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We have many colleagues to thank for inspiration, companionship, assistance, and support throughout our engagements with the scholarship of teaching and learning. First, of course, are two Carnegie Foundation presidents. Ernest Boyer introduced the idea in the context of an ambitious agenda for broadening the kinds of scholarship recognized in the academy; Lee Shulman established the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) and made its work a centerpiece for the Foundation. Russell Edgerton was important to the development of the scholarship of teaching and learning too, first as president of the American Association for Higher Education, which provided important forums for discussion and debate about this new work, and then as education program director at The Pew Charitable Trusts, which provided a generous grant to initiate CASTL. Other important funders for Carnegie’s work on the scholarship of teaching and learning have included the Wabash Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The CASTL program engaged a very large number of people over its 12-year history, including some 160 faculty members in the six cohorts of its national fellowship program; leaders on the more than 250 campuses participating in three iterations of its campus program; representatives from some two dozen scholarly and professional societies; and participants in the programs that these fellows, leaders, and representatives organized under the CASTL name. We are grateful to all involved for their energy, commitment, good will, and good work. Their accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities form the core of what we discuss in this book. (Readers interested in the history of the CASTL program will find an overview in Appendix B.)

We owe a special acknowledgment to Barbara Cambridge. Director of the first two iterations of CASTL’s campus program while she was based at the American Association for Higher Education, Barbara continued on, with the three of us, as a member of the leadership team for the CASTL Institutional Leadership and Affiliates Program. She joined us in writing the report from our survey of institutional leaders (Appendix A) and is author of the scenarios we used in our concluding colloquium (Appendix C). We have been fortunate indeed to have Barbara as a colleague throughout the history of the CASTL program. We would also like to acknowledge our former Carnegie colleague, Richard Gale, who served as CASTL’s second director (between Pat Hutchings and Anthony Ciccone) and was responsible for the initial design of the CASTL Institutional Leadership and Affiliates Program.

The leaders of the 13 groups of campuses and organizations participating in the CASTL Institutional Leadership and Affiliates Program were central to making the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts. These colleagues not only led work in their own institutions but also coordinated collaboration between the other institutions in their groups—and, through their interaction with each other, contributed to the spread of ideas across the program. Individually and collectively these colleagues served as valuable advisors to the Carnegie leadership team, helping to plan the program’s colloquia, surveys, and other activities. Our deepest gratitude to the following individuals who served in these roles as our collaborators and friends: Cheryl Albers (Institutional Culture Group); Jaqueline M. Dewar (Affiliates); Donna Duffy (COPPER Group); Áine Hyland (Graduate Education Group); Teresa Johnson (Communities Group); Alan Kalish (Communities Group); Lisa Kornetsky (System Group); Lin Langley (Cross-Cutting Themes Group); Cheryl McConnell (Mentoring Group); Renee Meyers (System Group); Renee Michael (Mentoring Group); Patti Owen-Smith (Cognitive Affective Group); Nancy Randall (Undergraduate Research Group); Jennifer Robinson (Commons Group); Mary Savina (Cross-Cutting Themes Group); David Schodt (Liberal Education Group); and Carmen Werder (Student Voices Group).

This book has benefited from the advice and consent of many good colleagues both within and beyond the CASTL community. Readers will find them acknowledged for assistance with specific points in the text and in notes to the chapters that follow. We would, however, like to thank here our three anonymous reviewers for their sharp eyes, kind words, and smart suggestions. We are fortunate too in having had the opportunity to work with David Brightman, Aneesa Davenport, and their colleagues at Jossey-Bass (Wiley) Publishers. It has been a real pleasure.

We would also like to acknowledge the help of the many good colleagues who have contributed to the writing and production of this book. Stephanie Waldmann at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee contributed substantially to the chapter on faculty development, put our reference section in good order, and readied our manuscript for submission to the press. Nisha Patel and Megan Downey of the Carnegie Foundation provided expert technical assistance in the design and administration of our survey of participants in the Institutional Leadership and Affiliates Program (see Appendix A). Lisa Wilson, also of Carnegie, stepped in with timely assistance in copying and mailing our manuscript.

Indeed, we owe a very deep thank you to everyone at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who worked with us on CASTL from 1998 through 2009. Carnegie housed a lively intellectual community of scholars throughout these years, where the people engaged in various programs of work—on the scholarship of teaching and learning, on doctoral education, on preparation for the professions, on civic formation for undergraduate students, on developmental education in community colleges—learned from and informed each other’s work every day. We thank Gay Clyburn for her continuing efforts to bring Carnegie’s work on the scholarship of teaching and learning to a wider audience. And we thank Carnegie’s current president, Anthony Bryk, for his interest in CASTL’s work and his strong support for the program during its concluding year.

Finally, we would like to thank one another—Pat, Mary, and Tony—for the fun we’ve had as colleagues over CASTL’s long haul, as well as in the rigors of writing this particular book. Don, Ernie, and Kathy have been unfailingly supportive and gracious about our commitments to this work. That’s a good thing too, because in all likelihood we’ll be continuing our journeys with the scholarship of teaching and learning for many years to come. Projects end but the work goes on.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Pat Hutchings was the vice president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching from 2001 to 2009, and senior scholar there beginning in 1998, when she assumed the role of inaugural director of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She has written, spoken, and consulted widely on student outcomes assessment, integrative learning, the investigation and documentation of teaching and learning, the peer collaboration and review of teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Recent publications include The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-first Century, with four Carnegie colleagues (2008); The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons, with Mary Taylor Huber (2005); Ethics of Inquiry: Issues in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2002); and Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2000). Prior to joining Carnegie, she was a senior staff member at the American Association for Higher Education, where she directed the AAHE Assessment Forum (1987–1989) and the AAHE Teaching Initiative (1990–1998). From 1978 to 1987 she was a faculty member and chair of the English department at Alverno College. Her doctorate in English is from the University of Iowa.

Mary Taylor Huber is senior scholar emerita and consulting scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Involved in research at the Carnegie Foundation since 1985, Huber has directed projects on Cultures of Teaching in Higher Education; led Carnegie’s roles in the Integrative Learning Project and the U.S. Professors of the Year Award; and worked closely with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She speaks, consults, and writes on the scholarship of teaching and learning, on integrative learning, and on faculty roles and rewards. Coauthor of Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate with Charles Glassick and Gene Maeroff (1997), her recent books include Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, coedited with Sherwyn Morreale (2002); Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers (2004); and The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons with Pat Hutchings (2005). Huber is U.S. editor for Arts and Humanities in Higher Education and writes the book review column for Change magazine. A cultural anthropologist, she has also written books and essays on colonial institutions and cultures in Papua New Guinea, and she holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh.

Anthony (Tony) Ciccone is professor of French and director of the Center for Instructional and Professional Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He was senior scholar and director of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (2007–2010). Ciccone has authored a book and several articles on Molière, as well as two French-language textbooks. He has presented and consulted on the scholarship of teaching and learning nationally and internationally, provided essays for Campus Progress (2002), Creating a New Kind of University (2006), and Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (2008). Ciccone is past director of the Wisconsin Teaching Scholars program, which received a Hesburgh Certificate of Excellence in 2005. He has received an AMOCO Award for Teaching Excellence and the French Teacher of the Year Award from the Wisconsin Association of Foreign Language Teachers. At UW-Milwaukee, Tony works with faculty and staff to incorporate the principles of the scholarship of teaching and learning into general education reform, assessment, and first-year instruction. Currently, he teaches a freshman seminar, What’s So Funny? Historical and Contemporary Notions of Comedy and Laughter. He holds a doctorate in French from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The scholarship of teaching and learning encompasses a broad set of practices that engage teachers in looking closely and critically at student learning in order to improve their own courses and programs, and to share insights with other educators who can evaluate and build on their efforts. Over the last two decades, college and university faculty engaged in such work have accomplished a great deal. Yet, if higher education is to meet growing imperatives around student attainment, in regard to both quantity and quality of learning, the scholarship of teaching and learning must be better integrated into the fabric of campus life. This cannot be achieved by individuals or by small groups acting alone.

Bringing the principles and practices of the scholarship of teaching and learning to bear on critical educational goals requires action and advocacy by campus leaders—committee heads, chairs, deans, professional development leaders, assessment officers, provosts, and presidents—who understand how such work can strengthen intellectual community and institutional performance in their setting. Toward that end, this book examines four areas that we believe to be the growing edge for the scholarship of teaching and learning's impact on higher education: classroom teaching, professional development, institutional assessment, and the recognition and reward of pedagogical work. Our concluding chapter offers the following recommendations, mindful that they are necessarily broad and must be tailored and adapted to each campus's distinctive mission, history, and culture.

1.Understand, communicate, and promote an integrated vision of the scholarship of teaching and learning. There are many ways to support the scholarship of teaching and learning, and all of them depend on leadership's own understanding of the character of such work, and why it matters. This understanding must be informed by the views of faculty and staff who have embraced this new form of scholarship, and it must be communicated, in turn, to the broader campus community, a task that requires both vision and translation skills.

2.Support a wide range of opportunities to cultivate the skills and habits of inquiry into teaching and learning. If the practices of the scholarship of teaching and learning are to be woven into institutional life and work, they must be cultivated in multiple sites and settings. Leaders can help introduce such practices into the wide range of campus initiatives on teaching and learning that offer opportunities for inquiry-based professional development today.

3.Connect the scholarship of teaching and learning to larger, shared agendas for student learning and success. Bringing scholars of teaching and learning together around agendas that invite collaboration and cross-fertilization builds relationships among individuals with common interests in ways that can significantly advance institutional initiatives and goals.

4.Foster exchange between the campus scholarship of teaching and learning community and those with responsibility for institutional research and assessment. These two higher education movements can strengthen each other in important ways, building toward an integrated, multilayered system of evidence gathering and use for the ongoing improvement of student learning.

5.Work purposefully to bring faculty roles and rewards into alignment with a view of teaching as scholarly work. Many campuses have revised institutional policies and language, but much remains to be done to craft guidelines for evaluation, documentation, and peer review that adequately recognize the scholarship of teaching and learning. Leaders must also push this work forward at the department and program level, where policies are translated into practice.

6.Take advantage of and engage with the larger, increasingly international teaching commons. Campus leaders can make a place for the scholarship of teaching and learning within the institution by supporting it though words, actions, and funding. But signals from outside the institution matter as well, and there is much to be gained by connecting with the broader scholarship of teaching and learning community and the opportunities it affords.

7.Develop a plan and time line for integrating the scholarship of teaching and learning into campus culture, and monitor progress. Developed collaboratively with others who have a stake and interest in the work, a good plan provides a shared sense of direction, purpose, and momentum, and reinforces connections to institutional goals and mission.

8.Recognize that institutionalization is a long-term process. Integrating the scholarship of teaching and learning into the ongoing work and life of the campus will necessarily entail setbacks and slowdowns. Success will require sustained leadership, creativity, and flexibility on the part of everyone involved.

CHAPTER ONE

Why the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Matters Today

We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old “teaching versus research” debate and give the familiar and honorable term “scholarship” a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work.

–Ernest Boyer1

In 1990 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published Ernest Boyer's short book, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. It was a time of transition for U.S. colleges and universities. The Cold War's end had weakened the conventional rationale for federally funded research; America's diminished economic position had raised questions about higher education's teaching effectiveness; a host of social and environmental crises called out for renewed attention to service. “Challenges on the campus and in society have grown,” Boyer stated, “and there is a deepening conviction that the role of higher education, as well as the priorities of the professoriate, must be redefined to reflect new realities” (p. 3).

Scholarship Reconsidered proposed a novel approach for addressing these problems. As Russell Edgerton, then president of the American Association for Higher Education, explained in an endorsement for the book: “The problem is not simply one of ‘balance’—of adjusting the weights we attach to teaching, research, and service—but of reclaiming the common ground of scholarship that underlies all these activities.”2 By identifying the scholarship of teaching, along with the scholarships of discovery, integration, and application as “four separate, yet overlapping functions” of the professoriate (p. 16), Boyer introduced an intriguing new term into academic discourse, and initiated a lively conversation about what it might mean to undertake college and university teaching as serious intellectual work.

Since 1990 that conversation has traveled far. In concert with a broad shift in focus from teaching to learning among thoughtful educators, the scholarship of teaching has become “the scholarship of teaching and learning,” and the work has widened too. Today “the serious study that undergirds good teaching” (Boyer, 1990, p. 23) is understood to include not just knowledge of the discipline, but also “the latest ideas about teaching the field” (Hutchings and Shulman, 1999, p. 13). Teaching and learning have both become more public: faculty are reflecting on their teaching in ways that can be shared with a wider community of educators, and, using a variety of evidence-gathering and documentation strategies, they are making their students’ learning more visible too. Today's scholars of teaching and learning treat their classrooms and programs as a source of interesting questions about learning; find ways to explore and shed light on these questions; use this evidence in designing and refining new activities, assignments, and assessments; and share what they've found with colleagues who can comment, critique, and build on new insights (Huber and Hutchings, 2005).

By going public with their work, scholars of teaching and learning are also venturing into and helping to create a new space for pedagogical exchange and collaboration that two of us have called the teaching commons, a space in which “communities of educators committed to pedagogical inquiry and innovation come together to exchange ideas about teaching and learning and use them to meet the challenges of educating students for personal, professional, and civic life” (Huber and Hutchings, 2005, p. x). Of course, there have always been small communities of scholars in every field who have made pedagogically relevant work available to each other through regular channels of scholarly discourse—conferences, publications, collaborations, and the like. And there have long been networks of specialists in education and the learning sciences. But scholars of teaching and learning—typically faculty who teach their subjects but have not generally considered themselves pedagogical experts—are making distinctive contributions. They are helping through their own work to connect different regions within this commons (bringing literature from their own fields to bear on teaching issues, borrowing from the literature of other fields); they are finding ways to use the ideas they discover through the commons to understand and improve learning in their own classrooms and programs; and they are adding to that commons a new body of knowledge derived from inquiry and innovation in situations of practice.3

The number of faculty engaged in this work, though as yet modest, is growing.4 And these men and women are worth watching because the scholarship of teaching and learning, as practiced today, foreshadows what members of the academic profession will be doing as educators tomorrow. The United States provides access to higher education for a wide population. But student success lags too far behind. The most urgent matter concerns the large number of students who start but don't complete college.5 But the broader issue, as Derek Bok argues in Our Underachieving Colleges, concerns “unfulfilled promises and unrealized opportunities” (2006, p. 57). Undergraduates, even those who complete degrees, are not learning as much or as well as they should. If students are to be adequately prepared for life, work, and civic participation in the twenty-first century, colleges and universities must pay closer attention to the heart of the educational enterprise. What is it really important for students to know and be able to do? How can higher education institutions and their faculty help students get there? The scholarship of teaching and learning brings powerful new principles and practices to ground deliberations about these questions in sound evidence and help point the way.6

This book is about the scholarship of teaching and learning, why it matters today—and what it promises for tomorrow. In this first chapter, we situate the work in the broader context of the turn toward learning in higher education policy and practice, and discuss the challenges this shift poses for institutions and faculty. Because we draw many of our examples and insights from the experience of individuals and institutions participating in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL, 1998–2009), we will describe that program and its place in the larger movement that is broadening the scope and deepening understanding of this work. We then look briefly at four areas we believe to be the growing edge for the work's impact on higher education. These areas, subjects of the next four chapters, include classroom teaching and learning, professional development, assessment, and the value (and evaluation) of teaching. Our final chapter asks what colleges and universities would look like if the principles and practices of the scholarship of teaching and learning were to take hold across academic culture, and what leaders can do to move their institutions in that direction. We conclude this first chapter with a look at the evidence we draw on in this book, followed by a return to Scholarship Reconsidered, and our conviction that the scholarship of teaching and learning can help colleges, universities, and the academic profession responsibly and effectively address the new realities confronting higher education today.

In short, we argue that it is time to reconsider the scope of the scholarship of teaching and learning, and see it as a set of principles and practices that are critical to achieving institutional goals for student learning and success.

THE TURN TOWARD LEARNING

The scholarship of teaching and learning is part of a broader transformation in the intellectual culture of higher education, where attention to learning has been growing steadily over the past twenty years. As Robert Barr and John Tagg put it in their influential 1995 article, “From Teaching to Learning”: “A paradigm shift is taking hold in American higher education. In its briefest form, the paradigm that has governed our colleges is this: A college is an institution that exists to provide instruction. Subtly but profoundly we are shifting to a new paradigm: A college is an institution that exists to produce learning. This shift changes everything. It is both needed and wanted” (p. 13). Researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and education; funders from public and private foundations; leaders of higher education associations and policy centers; accreditors; college and university administrators; professional developers; and information technology specialists have all contributed to this shift—and so, importantly, have front-line practitioners: faculty themselves and even students. The result, if not as radical as the term “paradigm shift” suggests, has included an extraordinarily rich array of pedagogical, curricular, and assessment initiatives that often challenge familiar ways of educating college and university students.

Manifestations of this turn toward learning are everywhere, especially in renewed attention to student learning outcomes spurred by accreditation requirements that ask institutions to be more intentional about their educational programs and to determine whether they are actually achieving their goals. Colleges and universities across the country have set up committees and established offices to coordinate campus efforts to identify learning outcomes at departmental, program, and institutional levels and to devise appropriate assessment strategies and improvement cycles. Indeed, it would be hard to find faculty anywhere who have not by now engaged in such activities in at least modest ways.

Institutions’ efforts in this regard are strengthened by initiatives undertaken through a variety of academic associations. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has been particularly influential in seeding campus deliberations on learning outcomes for liberal education, most recently through its Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) initiative. Identifying four “essential learning outcomes” (knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, intellectual and practical skills, personal and social responsibility, and integrative learning) to be achieved “at successively higher levels across [students’] college studies,” AAC&U has organized a host of conferences, institutes, and cross-campus projects to elucidate and elaborate what these ambitious goals might mean in theory and look like in practice (2007, p. 3).

Many other associations are also leading efforts along these lines. For example, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project, initiated in 2003, has involved 220 institutions that have set a goal of producing “graduates who are committed to being active, involved citizens in their communities.” The project has brought campuses together in national and regional meetings, in a national assessment project, and in “hundreds of campus initiatives including voter education and registration, curriculum revision and projects, campus audits, specific days of action and reflection (MLK Day of Service, Constitution Day), speaker series, and many recognition and award programs” (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, “About Us”). Similarly, Campus Compact, an association of some 1,200 presidents of two- and four-year colleges and universities, offers a variety of resources and initiatives to help institutions organize, support, and assess community service, civic engagement, and service learning (Campus Compact, “Who We Are”).

Disciplinary and professional fields have been no less active. The STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), in particular, stand out—in part due to the National Science Foundation's efforts to improve the recruitment and retention of women and minorities as science majors, and to enhance science literacy for all (Seymour, 2001). Over the past twenty years, the National Science Foundation (and other science education foundations) have funded a great number of collaborative efforts to explore curricular and pedagogical innovations aimed at helping more students learn more science at more sophisticated levels of understanding. This is not to say that the work has been without controversy, but it has helped to make conversation about teaching and learning a more familiar part of academic science, and to make promising innovations better known and more widespread (for instance, the early introduction of design experiences into engineering programs; see Sheppard, Macatangay, Colby, and Sullivan, 2009).

Indeed, the desire to engage undergraduates in disciplinary knowledge practices is a common thread running through educational reform in a wide swath of fields today. Across the disciplinary spectrum, one can find critics of older, more “passive” pedagogies, which have often emphasized mastery of content at the expense of an understanding of how that knowledge is produced and used. For example, a recent collection of essays, Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind, by faculty from the University of Wisconsin System (Gurung, Chick, and Haynie, 2008) explores this shift to more active learning in the humanities (history, literary studies), in the fine arts (creative writing, music theory and performance, the arts), in the social sciences (geography, human development, psychology, sociology), and in the natural sciences and mathematics (agriculture, biological sciences, computer science, mathematics, physics). These reform ideas are the leading edge in disciplinary pedagogy, not yet the norm but opening new possibilities for undergraduate learning in many fields.

One of the best overviews of what has (and has not) been accomplished through the past twenty years of attention to learning in higher education can be found in George Kuh's study High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter (2008). In this important report, Kuh—founding director of the National Survey of Student Engagement—discusses 10 teaching and learning practices that “have been widely tested and that have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds” (p. 9). The list, familiar to all who follow the reform literature in higher education, includes first-year seminars; common intellectual experiences; learning communities; writing-intensive courses; collaborative assignments and projects; undergraduate research; diversity/global learning; service and community-based learning; internships; and capstone courses and portfolios. All these strategies are being used today to promote disciplinary habits of mind as well as the kinds of cross-cutting learning outcomes envisioned by AAC&U's LEAP initiative. Yet Kuh finds that these practices are not evenly distributed within or across institutions.

In fact, many high-impact practices like first-year seminars and common intellectual experiences cannot be implemented by a single faculty member or department alone; and none of them—even when they can be done by an individual working on his or her own—are easy to do well. As Kuh notes, these practices do not come with simple blueprints to follow, but “take many different forms, depending on learner characteristics and on institutional priorities and contexts” (2008, p. 9). As a result, whole communities of practitioners, both national and international, have assembled around each of these (and many other) promising practices, with their own conferences, workshops, publications, and web sites.7

Educational innovation today invites, even requires, levels of preparation, imagination, collaboration, and support that are not always a good fit (to say the least) with the inherited routines of academic life. As we'll see throughout this book, leaders and participants in efforts to improve students’ educational experiences and outcomes often feel they are working against the grain. Bureaucratic barriers, financial realities, time constraints, and faculty evaluation policies can all inhibit the development or spread of promising pedagogical and curricular practices within (and among) institutions (Schneider and Shoenberg, 1999). And these factors are exacerbated by the rise in the number of faculty on contingent appointments, often without access to the support, security, and seniority that would encourage and enable them to devote the time or to take the risks associated with innovation at the classroom and program levels (Schuster and Finkelstein, 2006; Gappa, Austin, and Trice, 2007).

How, then, can higher education make good on the promise of the turn toward learning? Policies work best when they build on what is already present in a culture—even if it is only a subculture—and higher education is fortunate to have a growing number of faculty who have already intensified their engagement with teaching in significant ways. As Derek Bok suggests, “one should not be too pessimistic … about the prospects for enlisting faculty support for a more searching, continuous process of self-scrutiny and reform” (2006, p. 342). We agree. There are professors on every campus who are looking closely and critically at their students’ learning, redesigning their courses and programs, and coming together to share what they've learned with others. Broadly speaking, these are the faculty who are engaged in what is now widely called the scholarship of teaching and learning.

LOOKING CLOSELY AND CRITICALLY AT LEARNING8

The scholarship of teaching and learning encompasses a broad set of practices that engage teachers in looking closely and critically at student learning for the purpose of improving their own courses and programs. It is perhaps best understood as an approach that marries scholarly inquiry to any of the intellectual tasks that comprise the work of teaching—designing a course, facilitating classroom activities, trying out new pedagogical ideas, advising, writing student learning outcomes, evaluating programs (Shulman, 1998). When activities like these are undertaken with serious questions about student learning in mind, one enters the territory of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

One of the best-known programs to develop and explore the possibilities of this approach to pedagogy was the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which concluded nearly a dozen years of work in 2009. Initiated in 1998 under the leadership of Lee Shulman, successor to Ernest Boyer as president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, CASTL included a national fellowship program for individual scholars of teaching and learning, and a succession of programs to promote the work on campuses and in disciplinary and professional associations. CASTL's reach was wide: over the years, 158 faculty members pursued classroom research projects in six cohorts of the year-long fellowship program; over 250 colleges and universities signed on for one or more of the campus program's increasingly international three phases; and some two dozen scholarly societies worked to raise the intellectual profile of teaching in their fields (see Appendix B).