As a young professor, my first two scholarship works were (at best) mediocre imitations of the brilliant scholarly work of my first mentor. I was struggling to enjoy and complete my work. Then, by random luck, I discovered that I could more directly align my passion for student learning and for teaching with my scholarly work by focusing on producing scholarship about teaching and learning. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (often referred to as SoTL) “is a systematic investigation of a teaching/learning issue that is shared for review, dissemination and possibly some action that changes what is done in the classroom.  Along with traditional educational research and the learning sciences, SoTL helps to provide the evidentiary basis for classroom teaching practice in higher education.” University of Minnesota Center for Education Innovation.

Since I discovered SoTL, I have experienced only joy in my scholarly work, and, in fact, I have often felt like I was getting away with something in getting to having my research feed my teaching so directly. If you are inclined to try your hand at SoTL scholarship, this post offers some guidance.

I will start with a cautionary note. Many years ago, when I was under consideration as a potential lateral hire at another law school, a faculty member told me that his colleagues would never seriously consider me because I write about teaching and learning. Indeed, I was not offered that position. I believe things today are much better for SoTL scholars, but, before embarking on a SoTL project, I would want to know that my law school would count such work towards any scholarly obligations.

The remainder of this post consists of a catalog of SoTL scholarship possibilities, offers a few suggestions for developing ideas for SoTL articles, and concludes with two final recommendations.

Taxonomy of SoTL Articles

• Articles based on a study you conduct regarding teaching techniques, course materials, studying behaviors, or curricula. Possibilities include 
  • Surveys of your students about their experience and evaluation of, for example, a particular teaching technique or the students studying practices;
  • Surveys of your entire law school’s population about the above topics or curriculum matters;
  • Small group interviews regarding these topics; and
  • Observational research in which you collect data about specific behaviors occurring in multiple law school classrooms, e.g., the percentage of classroom time devoted to Socratic-style questioning vs. lecture.
• Articles that communicate results from undergraduate SoTL studies and insights into their relevance to legal education.
• Essays or articles that explore more radical possibilities for change.
• Essays that identify flaws and biases built into the existing legal education system and practices.
• Studies that evaluate, anonymously, student work products to identify patterns in successes, errors, strategies, etc.

I have no doubt the above list is incomplete, but it is a good starting point.

Developing Ideas for SoTL Articles

Much SoTL research starts from a professor’s preliminary observation of student or professor errors, behaviors, or beliefs. Others start from observed learning challenges or an idea for or a recent adoption of an innovation. From any of these perspectives, even if you are studying a professor behavior or innovation, it is ideal to focus on the degree to which students learn rather than on what the professor does. From there, it is ideal to develop a hypothesis or at least a research question such as: 

• How prevalent is this behavior among students and what causes it? 
• Is this behavior helping or hindering earning? 
• What evidence would show that this innovation is working and how can I develop that evidence? 

In many instances, it is helpful to ask if any other higher education discipline has successfully addressed the matter. An upside of the existence of hundreds of doctoral programs in education and of the burgeoning of instructional design doctoral degrees is that all these candidates and their professors generate hundreds of studies and mountains of data. I tried a google scholar search of the term “higher education studies of cooperative learning.” My query yielded so many results that I do not believe I would ever have the time to do even a cursory review of them all. The results of your sortie outside legal education can serve as the fodder for an article that summarizes what other educators have found and the implications of those findings for legal education or assist you in formulating a research question and crafting a research design. 

Final Recommendations

I have two final suggestions. First, if you are going to study students, you will need to formally request approval to do so from your university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), the body that must approve studies that involve human subjects. That process is not always quick or smooth. Second, many of us who have become SoTL scholars found it helpful to start by asking someone whose SoTL work we admired to mentor us; for me, legal SoTL scholars such as Sophie Sparrow, Gerry Hess, Steve Friedland, Paula Lustbader, and Alice Thomas were invaluable resources. The great news is that the subset of the professoriate that conducts SoTL research is both eager to add new members and, as evidenced by their work, particularly predisposed to teaching others stuff. 

If you choose to try SoTL, I hope it brings you as much joy and inspiration as it has brought me.