How does the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning differ from Scholarly Teaching? The SoTL scholars we interviewed for our Scholarship of Teaching and Learning vs. Scholarly Teaching video (below) offer the following distinctions:

Scholarly Teaching

  • Consuming, using, and applying scholarship about teaching, learning, and disciplinary knowledge
  • Consulting the literature on teaching in your field
  • Consulting other teachers in your field and/or teaching and learning centers at your institution

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

  • Producing scholarship about teaching and learning
  • Asking questions about student learning, and conducting systematic inquiry to answer them
  • Making that research visible to a community of practice (whether locally or through peer-reviewed publication)
  • Seeking critical review of that research by others
  • Providing enough detail about that research to make it replicable
  • Leading to – for the individual and the community of practice – scholarly teaching

Of course, faculty can move between these two activities, sometimes focusing on being a scholarly teacher and at other times focusing on producing scholarship about teaching and learning. In the video below, Pat Hutchings advocates for thinking of both as part of a larger whole, with faculty bringing “habits of inquiry, questioning, evidence-gathering to their work as teachers.”