SoTL

The 2009 Lilly Greensboro conference presented a wealth of information about the Millenial Learners, as the conference title suggested it would (Millennial Learning: Teaching in the 21st Century). On Thursday Feb 19th I attended a pre-conference institute on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The workshop confirmed the process I had followed during my "action research" project last fall. When one of my WSSU colleagues asked to describe the difference between Action Research and SoTL, the presenters replied that SoTL includes the "dissemination" aspect and often times AR does not....... We were given a copy of a book titled "Inquiry into the College Classroom: A Journey Toward Scholarly Teaching" by Savory, Burnett, Goodburn. From glancing through the book it gives goes through a very structured 9-Step process to classroom inquiry and then provides a checklist as well as wealth of samples (over a 100 pages of actual exhibits of all kinds from sample inquiry questions, to sample survey items etc). It also provides "commentary" throughout for the classroom research to compare their experience to. I am looking forward to using this as a guide for my next AR/SoTL project. The workshop also allowed for each participant to write up their own inqiry question/project and then we did a "gallery walk" and posted feedback to one-another's. This part was less helpful to me as the feedback was very "surface" and not as deep as I would have liked. Overall I felt is was a good session to confirm where I want to go next and how to proceed with a bit more rigor and efficiency.