Interesting workshops about Teaching and Learning

This workshop is conducted by Sophia Abbot, Sarah Bunnell, Erin Fay, Aleid de Jong, and Chris Ostrowdun.

Have you been involved in a SoTL project, but aren't sure what to do with it next?  As learners in context, students have an inseparable relationship with SoTL, and their perspectives form the foundation of many SoTL studies(1). However, it is sometimes less apparent how students see themselves connecting and contributing to the field of SoTL as legitimate scholars(2). They may also be unsure of how SoTL experiences can support their future professional work and study, while others are actively counseled not to pursue SoTL but rather to focus on developing their disciplinary research expertise. Even as students have led SoTL scholarship, independently and in partnerships, they remain underrepresented as publicly recognised knowers and producers of SoTL(3) and their assertions of expertise have historically been undervalued or resisted in academia(4). Building Your Epistemic Confidence as a Valued SoTL Scholar 

This pre-conference workshop is designed for students and by students. The aim is for students (undergraduate and graduate) who have been involved in SoTL projects to connect with each other, and to reflect on and develop their epistemic confidence as contributors to and producers of SoTL.  In this highly interactive session, participants will engage in activities to map out where SoTL may fit into their goals for their future selves, and write and share personal statements asserting themselves as knowers in SoTL. In this process, we will explore what it means to be a student SoTL scholar across our institutional and locational contexts. Finally, we will facilitate connecting students with similar SoTL research interests and/or at similar developmental stages, and encourage ongoing connections throughout the conference and beyond.

This workshop is conducted by K. Alix Hayden and Diane Lorenzetti.

Evidence synthesis reviews utilize explicit, reproducible, transparent, and rigorous methods to investigate, aggregate, and contextualize the findings of individual research studies; further, evidence syntheses can advance knowledge and support evidence-informed practice and research across disciplines (Gough et al, 2020). Scoping reviews are one type of evidence synthesis. They provide a framework to enable SoTL researchers to identify the strengths, gaps, and research opportunities relevant to specific areas of inquiry, and investigate broad questions of 'what is out there' (Godfrey, 2020, p. 859). Scoping reviews can be used to explore how SoTL research is conducted or identify and clarify concepts and definitions relevant to SoTL (Peters, 2020).

In this interactive workshop we will utilize a case study approach to advance participants' capacity to implement current best practices in the planning, execution and reporting of scoping reviews on topics of relevance to SoTL. We will present and engage participants in guided activities and discussions regarding current guidance for the conduct of scoping reviews, including recommendations from JBI and the PRISMA Group (Peters, 2020; Tricco, 2018). Attendees will gain knowledge and practical experience navigating key aspects of scoping review methodology, including: question formulation, selection criteria, data collection/ search methods, data management, study selection, analysis and manuscript preparation. We will also explore and raise participants' awareness of common myths and misconceptions regarding scoping reviews. The workshop facilitators are two academic librarians who both have extensive experience in the teaching and practice of knowledge syntheses reviews, including scoping reviews.

This workshop is conducted by Nira Rahman.

'Fostering RID (Respectful, Inclusive and Diverse) in Classroom Context' workshop is designed for academic staff  involved in classroom teaching,  course design, or curriculum development. We often discuss ensuring student engagement to enhance learning experiences in higher education. To enhance student engagement and academic experience, we, as teachers and practitioners need to acknowledge the diversity of student experiences, aspirations, learning strategies and abilities as well as use culturally responsive and inclusive teaching pedagogies. This workshop aims to foster discussions on the construction of respectful, inclusive and diverse academic communities through shared understandings and collaborations. If the classroom is regarded as a true reflection of our diverse society, we need to understand and embrace cultural diversity to create respectful, inclusive and active communities within and beyond classrooms. This workshop highlights the importance of acknowledging diversity and differences in our thought process, learning styles and strategies to create better connection and communication in our classrooms. This interactive workshop will involve a pre-workshop questionnaire to include participants' ideas, opinion and challenges around inclusive and culturally responsive teaching in diverse classrooms.

In the workshop, participants will

• Define and develop concepts around positionality and intersectionality in inclusive teaching pedagogies.
• Explore 'sense of self' by using questions around identity; discuss concepts around positionality and intersectionality by using case studies from real classroom situations.
• Engage in hands-on activities from problem identification to resolution for facilitating discussion on how individuals understand their own academic journey experiences and how the academic community can support the development of intercultural understanding and enhancement of learning experiences. They will take part in 'pair and share' to define and develop the RID ground rules in classroom context. 
• Discuss and develop practical strategies to deal with bias and misconception, and obtain pragmatic approaches around ensuring equality and accessibility in diverse classrooms. They will engage in group activities (brainstorming, storytelling, experience exchanging) to develop practical strategies to deal with bias and misconception, as well as obtain pragmatic approaches to ensure equality and accessibility in diverse classrooms.

This workshop is conducted by Esther van Dijk and Femke Kirschner.

Academics who start a SoTL project experience this as challenging and may have many questions. After all, most academic teachers are not educational scientist with ready to use knowledge on teaching and learning processes. Therefore, to support teachers the Utrecht Roadmap for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (UR-SoTL) was developed. In eight steps the roadmap guides teachers in the process of designing and executing their own SoTL-project. It's a unique and practical tool when new or already actively engaged in SoTL-work. The Roadmap adds to the commonly used SoTL steps a scholarly analysis of teaching and learning using the CIMO-logic model. CIMO stands for learning:

• Context: the specific context of the teaching practice;
• Outcomes: the aspects of the students' learning process that the academic teacher would like to understand better or improve;
• Mechanisms: the factors influencing the (desired) learning outcomes, like cognitive, motivational and regulation processes3;
• Interventions: the teaching activities used to achieve the desired (learning) outcomes.

The strength of the CIMO-logic is that it supports (first time) SoTL-practitioners to explore the relation between their teaching activities, and the subsequent learning of the students, by studying relevant literature on generative learning processes. This scholarly analysis provides direction for a grounded and relevant research question and a focused plan for a SoTL project. In this workshop we will work with the attendees on the first three steps of the roadmap. These are the steps that have to be taken to go from a more or less general idea for a SoTL project, to a specific and detailed researchable teaching question.

This workshop is conducted by Peter Doolittle and Krista Wojdak.

This concurrent workshop is designed to engage teachers and developers in building their own context-specific active learning strategies “focused on their students, their curriculum, their outcomes, their classroom, their resources, their domain, their strengths“ and to learn how to effectively implement these strategies in the classroom.  While there is much research that affirms the effectiveness of active-learning over lecture-based courses (Freeman, et al., 2017; Theobald, et al., 2020), there is also a significant gap in the literature that provides specificity related to how active learning strategies should be designed and implemented (Bernstein, 2018; Martella, et al., 2020).  As such, this pre-conference workshop will engage SoTL and Teaching and Learning practitioners at all levels (novice to advanced) with activities and discussions aimed at providing a more nuanced understanding of what active learning is and how to best incorporate the appropriate strategies and approaches.   

The focus of this session will be on incorporating evidence-based approaches from the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and social perspectives that support learners in active learning at the lesson, course, and curricular level. The notion of active learning as a singular strategy will be problematized and reconsidered as we seek to identify a variety of course design and facilitation approaches that can foster active processing and agency.

This session is based on a restricted integrated review of active learning (Doolittle, et al., 2022), and the subsequent development of a framework based on a deep review of the literature.  This workshop is designed to engage SoTL professionals in the type of step-by-step, evidence-based, unambiguous guidelines to which Bertstein and Martella refer. This explicit guidance focuses on the construction and enactment of strategies that foster active learning and result in deep and flexible knowledge and skill.

This workshop is conducted by Mick Healey and Kelly Matthews.

'Going public' is one of the key features of SoTL (Center for Engaged Learning, 2013; Chick & Friberg, 2022). This highly interactive workshop will unpack some of the mysteries of publishing in internationally refereed teaching and learning journals and help colleagues find their voices through a variety of writing genres aimed at enhancing teaching and learning.  

Building on the conference theme 'Context matters' we argue that for SoTL to be sustainable we need to communicate our practices through a wide range of writing genres that capture and represent the diversity of SoTL practitioners and readers (Healey & Healey, 2018). In short, we argue that there is no one way of going about writing for publication in SoTL, and we offer guidance for writing in many different genres (Healey, Matthews, & Cook-Sather, 2019: 2020). 

This interactive workshop, which draws on resources from Healey, Matthews, & Cook-Sather (2019; 2020), will give you opportunities to: choose a suitable journal; draft the title and abstract; plan and structure your paper; discuss seeing your article through to submission and responding to referee comments.  The intended audience is primarily faculty/staff and students who have limited experience in publishing their SoTL work. However, our approach and strategies should also support and guide more experienced colleagues in rethinking or expanding some of their writing practices. The workshop focuses on making participants more confident and productive in their writing.  

Participants should bring four copies of a draft title and brief abstract (150-200 words) on a SoTL piece they plan to write in one of the following genres for an outlet of your choice: empirical research article; conceptual article; literature review; case study; reflective essay; or opinion piece.

This workshop is conducted by Nancy Chick, Peter Felten, and Katarina Mårtensson.

Join us for a workshop designed to explore SoTL as a field and to dig in to the processes of doing SoTL. Our workshop orients participants to SoTL as a practice for improving their teaching and their students' learning and for contributing to collegial communities interested in postsecondary teaching and learning-and perhaps also for addressing the ethical, moral, and social purposes of higher education in ways that ultimately contribute to 'social justice in the world' (Kreber 2013, 11).  We will begin by guiding participants in important preliminary reflections, including the specific contexts, identities, and purposes that inform their SoTL practice. Then we will facilitate the hands-on work of planning their own SoTL project that is tailored to their goals and contexts-and that is flexible enough to respond to the almost inevitable messiness of SoTL inquiry. Finally, participants will consider the implications of SoTL practice for what they do and who they are as academics.

This highly interactive workshop is designed for participants who are new (or relatively new) to SoTL, but we also welcome more experienced participants who would like to critically reflect on the assumptions and contexts that are the foundation of their ongoing SoTL inquiries. We take an expansive view of how SoTL is done, so colleagues from all disciplines, professional roles, institutional types, and geographical regions will find themselves represented in our guidance and our illustrative examples. Throughout the workshop, we will draw on materials and exercises from a forthcoming open-access book on SoTL authored by the session's facilitators. Participants will leave with a sketch of a plan for a SoTL project, meaningful connections to several colleagues, and a foundation that primes them for purposeful engagement in the ISSOTL conference.

This workshop is conducted by Brett McCollum and Melanie Hamilton.

The Big Tent analogy, which characterizes the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as a space of inclusivity and collaboration (Chick, 2014), has been criticized for neglecting the existence of tensions and disagreements within the community. In order to enhance our understanding and appreciation of scholarship emanating from diverse disciplinary traditions, it is imperative that we recognize and confront our own biases, which are often influenced by our academic training. Hubball & Clarke (2010) remind us that because faculty members are from many disciplines, undertaking SoTL research can be both epistemologically challenging and empowering at the same time. Our own experiences as SoTL scholars, and our involvement in leading SoTL communities and dissemination venues, has increased our awareness and respect for diverse research traditions. At the same time, our experiences have helped us to understand the challenges that many SoTL scholars face during the peer review process from others that are unfamiliar with their epistemological lens.  Drawing upon Felten's (2013) Principles of 'Good SoTL,' recently updated by Webb (2020) to encompass faculty engaged in learning and development, this pre-conference workshop posits the addition of a new principle to augment existing ones, resulting in 'Great SoTL': the explicit identification of one's SoTL Lens. As we reflect on Felten's Principles a decade later, we encourage scholars to embrace this additional principle as a means of supporting methodological diversity within our field as we collectively advance the quality and impact of SoTL.

This workshop is conducted by Martina Balaam, Karan Bland, Linda Ferrington, Jessica Macer-Wright, and Chris Maloney.

Tertiary students worldwide are at elevated risk of mental health difficulties (Baik 2019) which impacts their academic and interpersonal lives. The challenge for higher education institutions is to find innovative solutions to better support student mental wellbeing, without additional workload pressures for students and staff. Studies have investigated ways to approach curriculum integration of mental wellbeing (Ryan 2022), however, student mental health continues to be of concern (Barrett 2020). Academics have an important role in promoting mental wellbeing through the curriculum (Baik 2019). Research suggests that curriculum integration has been challenging (Scobie 2018). We propose to approach this in a new way by providing an opportunity to design collaborative solutions through an innovation challenge. This workshop asks participants from diverse backgrounds to work in teams towards the common goal of using SoTL approaches to innovate in mental wellbeing curriculum integration. Our Innovation Goal is to produce a practical and flexible wellbeing integration strategy that can be applied in different contexts, without compromising staff wellbeing, or adding to student and staff workloads. Participants will be encouraged to propose ideas and collaborate on other participants ideas. We will stimulate dialogue with interactive discussions around challenges experienced in the following themes: 

1. Social belonging and inclusivity
2. Physical and psychological wellbeing
3. Learning
4. Scaffolding
5. Assessment
6. Workload 

The ideas generated will be used to produce a SoTL resource which will be submitted for inclusion in Teaching and Learning Inquiry, providing the opportunity for all ISSOTL members to engage in collaborative support of student wellbeing curriculum integration. Workshop participants will be invited to continue to develop their innovation by contributing to the resource and forming an international community of practice focused on applying SoTL to support student wellbeing.

This workshop is conducted by Mike Beam, Derek Chastain, Tara Darcy, Rebecca Itow, and David Pace.

No context for SoTL is conducted is more essential to student learning than that provided by the years of education students experience before they arrive in college. Yet, efforts to understand and improve learning in high school and in college generally occur in total isolation.          

In this workshop, participants will be explore the potential for using SoTL to help bridge the gap between high school and college education and to help teachers from both levels institutions develop common strategies for increasing student learning in their disciplines. They will learn about a particular model for facilitating such contacts using the Decoding the Disciplines approach* and explore ways to implement such communication across the K12/College frontier using both Decoding and other SoTL approaches.

More specifically, participants will:  

• Discuss short videos in which first year college students describe their transition from high school to college classes  
• Receive a very brief introduction to the Decoding the Disciplines process* and to a model for using it to facilitate K-16 conversations   
• Actively participate in a Decoding interview, in which essential bottlenecks that impede leaning in first-year courses are identified and explored and discuss how such interviews could be used to facilitate communication between high school and college teachers  
• Brainstorm how this process and other SoTL approaches might be used to develop pedagogical strategies that unify and focus student learning across the entire K-16 spectrum  
• Explore together the possibility of initiating a SoTL in a K-16 Context' interest group within ISSOTL 

* Decoding the Disciplines has become one of the major strands in SoTL and has been the subject of four books, three major web sites, and more than 200 articles and papers. More about the approach is available at http://decodingthedisciplines.org/.