The 2016 Pre-ISSOTL Council of Undergraduate Research Symposium challenged participants to consider the intersections between Undergraduate Research (UR) and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Although some might suggest that work at this intersection is underdeveloped and under-appreciated, this was the…

Last month I posited that four productive disruptions (scaling access, building partnerships, thinking globally locally, and closing the loop with the scholarship of teaching and learning) can foster creative problem-solving about learning initiatives on our campuses. In this post, I examine the second…

A growing number of publications offer tips for faculty, undergraduate research programs, and institutions about how to support undergraduate research (UR). The Council on Undergraduate Research’s (CUR) Characteristics of Excellence in Undergraduate Research, for example, identifies core features for successful undergraduate research…

Faculty mentors play a significant role in making undergraduate research (UR) a high-impact educational practice. Kuh and O’Donnell (2013) contend that the deepest engagement in UR occurs when students participate in all aspects of the research process in close working…

As a high-impact educational practice, undergraduate research (UR) can have significant impacts on student learning. UR can lead to better student retention and engagement (Kuh, 2008) and foster deep student learning of critical thinking, effective communication, and complex problem-solving, which…

This month we’re taking a look back at some of the Center for Engaged Learning’s most watched videos in 2014 and pairing them with some you might have missed. Produced for the ISSOTL Online 2013 series on Student Voices in…

Many of the good practices faculty use to gather insights from students, such as asking for mid-semester feedback, are helpful, but they typically do not lead to authentic partnership between students and faculty. In most of these cases, faculty frame the questions, students provide answers, and then faculty alone decide whether, and how, to use to that information. This process often resembles a customer-service relationship. How satisfied are you with the teaching in this course? What do you like best, and least, about the class?

Partnership, on the other hand, is a collaborative, reciprocal process. In a partnership, all participants have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully, although not necessarily in the same ways.