Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Series

From Classroom Insight to Scholarly Impact: Navigating the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

Teaching plays an important role in our academic lives, and we often take pride when our teaching approaches succeed. Yet, how can we transform these observations into credible evidence that can be shared and recognized? The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) provides a useful framework for faculty members to engage in a systematic inquiry into their teaching and their students' learning, contributing their findings to the wider academic community. While promising, undertaking SoTL can be challenging as it requires navigating unfamiliar inquiry approaches, collecting student learning evidence properly, and identifying the right dissemination channels. This seminar aims to address these common challenges while offering suggestions to maximize the impact of teaching insights through SoTL. Participants will explore practical strategies for embedding SoTL into their existing course design and collecting valid learning data. Colleagues from all disciplines are welcome to join the seminar as we will also discuss how SoTL can be meaningfully adopted across different disciplines.

Prof Tracy Zou Assistant Professor of the Department of Educational Administration and Policy, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Tracy Zou, PhD, EdD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is passionate about enhancing teaching and learning in higher education through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). She has been working with faculty members from engineering, science, business, and humanities on various teaching development and SoTL projects. Her work has been published in reputable journals such as Higher Education and Studies in Higher Education. She edited an e-newsletter Teaching and Learning Connections dedicated for publishing SoTLarticles when she worked at the University of Hong Kong. Currently, she serves as a co-editor for the International Journal for Academic Development and the Journal of Studies in International Education. Additionally, she received the Exemplary Teaching Award from the Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2022-23 and has been a Senior Fellow of Advance HE since 2020.