The Ingredients:

-Massive administrative support
-A dedicated director
-A faculty advisory council
-A core of faculty members who are willing to engage in this work and share it with others

A Core of Faculty Members Willing To Engage in This Work and Share It With Others

Because this unit of the tutorial deals with launching campus SOTL initiatives, much emphasis is on administrative considerations. However, all the administrative brilliance in the world will not attract or sustain faculty in a SOTL initiative if they do not see relevance to academic issues important to them.

If a campus already has scholars of teaching and learning, these may provide examples or kernels of issues which engage colleagues. But what if such scholars and issues are not readily identifiable?

Engaging faculty should not be a struggle. The vast majority of faculty have a natural curiosity about teaching issues and a latent desire to do teaching-related inquiry. Making time and resources for reflection and inquiry available to faculty in light of their teaching loads and other responsibilities might be a challenge but as Shulman has suggested, students already provide faculty with more information than they normally use. Thus additional work, if any, in information-gathering should be minimal.

A possible two-step procedure is to conduct a kind of “needs assessment” … formal or informal … to identify campus issues for possible investigation; e.g. academic incivility. The second step is to connect an identified need to language and issues that people care about … framing the issue to make it attractive in the particular setting.

If engaging faculty in issues and framing them is of concern to you, you might keep this concern in mind when viewing other examples of campus programs , the issues investigated in Faculty SOTL Projects (Unit 2 B), and Framing the Question. (Unit 3 B, page 2).