Teaching quality is essential for having a high standard of educational quality. To achieve this, teachers need to be supported in their professional development.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a way to support teachers in the development of their teaching practice as SoTL is the systematic study of teaching practices and learning experiences with the goal of improving students learning. In SoTL, the focus is on a scholarly approach to teaching and learning, where teachers act like researchers to investigate and develop their own teaching practice. The teachers work systematically with continuous improvement of their teaching and investigate the teaching impact and how it supports the students learning. SoTL also involves reflection on their own teaching practice. Furthermore, it adds a possibility to contribute the accumulated knowledge to the ongoing discussion about the development of engineering education by participating in conferences within Engineering Education Research and to publish scientific articles in relevant journals as well as networking with other teachers and educational consultants around the world within Engineering Education Research.
Since 2018, we have been running a SoTL program for teachers at our institute. Each year a number between 10 and 20 teachers have participated in the program. The SoTL program is scheduled to take a year, and consists of seminars with external and internal presentations, workshops and work with own projects. Furthermore, the program consists of feedback sessions with the program leader and peer-to-peer feedback sessions.
The participants must come up with a question, “a teaching problem”, which is something they are curious about in their teaching and want to investigate. During the SoTL program, each participant makes a research design, collects, and analyzes data and at the end of the program makes a presentation of the results from the project. Furthermore, the participant is encouraged to participate in educational conferences.
In this presentation, we will present our findings from three times running a SoTL program for teachers. Furthermore, we will present and discuss the challenges of implementing a SoTL program for teachers.