Our teaching conversations are centered around the process of scholarship

KU is participating in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Institutional Leadership Program. KU was chosen for the project based on its record of integrating teaching and learning into the campus culture. Since many KU faculty members are engaged in answering questions about their teaching, and since a large number of KU faculty members contribute to the ongoing public sharing of intellectual work around teaching, the University was recognized as a potential contributor to the program.

The CASTL Institutional Leadership program is a three-year partnership between Carnegie and higher education institutions that have shown a commitment to examining teaching and learning. The group will meet yearly to discuss each institution's research on improving teaching and learning, and what they can do to make their findings more visible to the public.

At the first meeting in November 2006, the KU team presented a report that included the information shown in the Overview below and in the four links at the right.

OVERVIEW

The University of Kansas has undertaken a systematic program to incorporate the principles of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) into its teaching mission. Using ideas derived from Glassick et al. Scholarship Assessed and Bernstein et al. Making Teaching and Learning Visible, we have organized discussion of teaching and its evaluation around reflection of teaching's impact on students' understanding. The key idea we offer is careful alignment of development opportunities for faculty members with the process and criteria for assessment of individual teaching, unit level teaching, and institutional representation of teaching and learning. We observe that faculty members respond well to a coherent framework for teaching goals and evaluation, and aligning the many processes that evaluate teaching means less effort and time expended in constructing representations of that work.

It will take time and much local conversation to bring evaluation of teaching, department learning goals, and teaching awards into alignment and with the incorporation of inquiry into learning. The KU faculty group believes that our participation in the CASTL Leadership Program will provide an occasion for the conversations about teaching that will guide us on a necessary and appropriate path toward this outcome.

The KU faculty team members are:
Dan Bernstein, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence
Chris Haufler, Professor of Biology and Director of the Undergraduate Biology Program
Susan Twombly, Professor and Chair of Education Leadership and Policy Studies
Ann Cudd, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Women's Studies
Nancy Kinnersley, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Paul Atchley, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rick Hale, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering

Faculty Community Around Teaching

Faculty Governance Consideration of the Evaluation of Teaching

Department Level Analysis of Learning Based on SoTL

Campus Teaching Awards