UBC Faculty Certificate Program in SoTL

I just finished the UBC Faculty Certificate Program in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. It’s a year-long workshop in which participants meet monthly and do a number of things, including:

• Create an extensive teaching dossier (next year this will be entirely online), including statements of teaching philosophy, reflections on teaching, evidence of teaching effectiveness, leadership in curriculum/pedagogy/scholarship of teaching and learning, and more

• Engage in peer review of teaching: visit two other classes and have two people visit your own

• Read and discuss articles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and keep a monthly journal of reflections on these readings

• Develop your own research project in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, with help from the workshop’s facilitators and other workshop members; do a presentation on this project to the group and get feedback; write a proposal for the project. You don’t actually have to complete the project that year by collecting data–there is not enough time to do that! But you go through the work of developing it and then can collect data afterwards.

I found it a fantastic experience, and recommend it to anyone. It seems especially valuable for Instructors, as work in SoTL can be part of advancing towards Professor of Teaching.

It does mean a significant amount of work, though; in addition to once-monthly meetings of three hours, one must do all the above things from Sept. to April. There are scholarships available, and I got one of those to use to pay a grad student to help with anything from marking to my administrative work to helping with the SoTL research project itself, so that helped me handle the extra time the workshop took.

Here is an announcement of the application and deadline for 2012-2013. Note that internal Faculty deadlines may be earlier (e.g., the deadline for the Arts Faculty is May 1), since the Faculty may be selecting among candidates first–I think that’s how it works.

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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Leadership Program

We are now taking applications for the next cohort offering (September, 2012 – April 2013) – DEADLINE = MAY 4th. Please see the Certificate website for more details about the on-line application process and the Teaching Scholarship Scheme:
http://ctlt.ubc.ca/about-isotl/programs-events/faculty-sotl-program/administrative-and-application-details/