Putting SoTL into Practice

I attended a presentation the other day by David DiBattista, a professor a Brock University and 3M Teaching Fellow. David was invited to McMaster as part of a campus-wide reading group on pedagogy (who needs ‘one campus, one book’ when you can read about this stuff? ) sponsored by Dr. Joe Kim. David’s presentation was actually about a different kind of multiple choice test, called the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique, which I will write more about later, but he also talked briefly about Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

According to David, putting the SoTL into practice means:

• attending T&L workshops
• reading the T&L literature
• reflecting on and evaluating your teaching practice
• sharing your knowledge with others

This statement made me feel pretty good because I realized that all of these are things in which I have been trying to engage our librarians. Members of the campus T&L support unit have helped me put together T&L workshops for the librarians, and I have tried to encourage participation in T&L events on and off campus. I am working on creating RSS feeds to discipline-specific T&L journals so that I can ‘push’ articles of interest with the librarians, or so they can consult these on their own (I’m hung up on trying to get the feeds to populate a page, instead of having people login to a reader to see them). Our Teaching Squares (TS) project encourages reflective practice, and this year, everyone is expected to participate either in TS or in a peer feedback initiative. Finally, I have been trying to share knowledge through this blog, and through the “Teaching and Learning @ Mac Libraries” blog we are using to communicate internally (feel free to take a look; thanks to my colleague Nora, it’s a lot more developed than this one!). We are also working to build community though the workshops and the Teaching Squares project, but in addition, this year, we will be experimenting with cross-disciplinary “team teaching” in some of our large classes. The idea is that, under the lead of the appropriate liaison librarian, we will get together as team to review the objectives for a class, brainstorm about how it could be taught in the hopes of sharing knowledge and getting some innovative ideas and then we will either team teach it or members will be responsible for teaching some sections or building the online support. No more, “here’s the slides, let me know how it goes”; this is all about building the class from the bottom up and “blowing it up” (as my colleague Jeannie An says)!

That’s not to say that it’s all going swimmingly or that there’s no room for improvement, but at least it’s reassuring to hear that we’re heading in the right direction.

Tags: SoTL, teaching squares, teambuilding