Change the faculty member’s view of what faculty members do

Under the aegis of SOTL, employ administrative resources to acknowledge and reward a fuller range of faculty work.

Expand the range of activities that get rewarded

Many campuses have faculty who have done scholarship of teaching for years. However, nobody necessarily knows who they are if such scholarship does not count in reward systems. In this campus example, small grants ($1000) were offered at the start of the SOTL initiative for scholars of teaching to present work already completed or well underway. These unusual “presentation” grants for work that may have already been done made existing scholars and their projects visible campus-wide as models. Later conventional “research” grants to undertake new investigative projects were offered.
Many campuses already have small grant programs. These can be tweaked to foster SOTL. A spin-off benefit can be greater productivity for a given institutional investment in grants; e.g. a grant that was previously to implement a teaching innovation will, as a SOTL project, also require data-gathering and analysis to assess the effect of the innovation as well as dissemination of results to peers.

Expand the range of rewards

Opportunities to present their work to large interdisciplinary audiences in high profile campus-wide events; to have their abstracts, biographical sketches, and photographs widely disseminated; and to experience the support and confidence of the central administration proved enough reward to some faculty members for them to offer themselves as SOTL presenters(without grants). For some faculty members, finding a community that valued their work to improve teaching and that helped them find opportunities for professional growth and recognition beyond the campus and beyond opportunities available in their departmental and disciplinary cultures also proved rewarding.