Faculty members should be encouraged to move acts of teaching that are characterized by points in the red toward the orange … in other words toward scholarly teaching. To the extent that teachers adopt practices of scholarly teaching, their teaching will probably improve. Similarly, their acts of scholarship will probably improve their teaching, develop them professionally, and add to our body of useful knowledge about practice. However, we must stop short of accepting either the proposition that scholarly teaching implies excellent teaching or the converse. Similarly scholarship of teaching does not imply excellent teaching.

“Excellence” is often confounded with “scholarly teaching” and “scholarship of teaching.” Scholarly teaching practices do not necessarily confer excellence. All seasoned faculty know of colleagues who are excellent teachers … excellent in terms of achieving superb outcomes in students … without their meeting any of the criteria of “scholarly teaching” Avoidable indignation and opposition to SOTL initiatives are justifiably engendered in faculty by the notion that “scholarly teaching” and “scholarship of teaching” are necessarily what one must do to be considered excellent in teaching.