“The question is not just ‘what does your machine produce,’ but ‘how does your garden grow’?”

Michael Scriven, “Thoughts on Educational Evaluation,” 1972

The Promise and Practice of Faculty Inquiry

Bill Moore, SBCTC &

Mickey Davis, UC-Berkeley

Research-

• Goals: make generalizable claims about causal relationships or processes

• Audience: national or international• Requirements: must conform to intensely

guarded norms of research community-- warrants for claims are highly technical,

including study design and methods of analysis

Evaluation

• Goals- determine the value and/or worth of a particular program or endeavor

• Audience- program participants, managers, and funders

• Requirements- Must be seen as credible and comprehensible to stakeholders. Inferences don’t need to be generalizable so warrants for inferences different

Faculty Inquiry

• Goals: to understand the teaching and learning process through a systematic and iterative examination and exploration of professional practice

• Audience: participating faculty • Requirements: the process of inquiry leads to

improvement through changes in awareness and focus and reforms instituted in response to findings

It takes a deliberate act to look at teaching from the perspective of learning. Actually, it takes a set of acts--individually

motivated and communally validated--to focus on questions and problems, gather data, interpret and share results…As with research, you cannot investigate everything at once.

What matters most is for teachers to investigate the problems that matter most to them…Ultimately, the measure of success for the scholarship of teaching movement will not

be the degree to which it can…discover solutions worth implementing, but the extent to which it is successful in

discovering problems worth pursuing. Randy Bass,

Georgetown University, 1999

Kinds of SOTL Questions

• “What works?” – questions seeking evidence about the relative effectiveness of different teaching approaches, e.g. alternative designs for delivering a course

• “What is?” – questions seeking to describe, not evaluate, a particular teaching approach or intervention, e.g. describe and systematically analyze student experience or learning outcomes

• “Visions of the possible” – questions related to teaching goals and how they can be achieved, e.g. how to reach students in “moments of difficulty” and transforming such instances into teachable moments

• “Conceptual frameworks” – questions shaping new forms of practice or theory-building, e.g. problem-based learning, community service-learning

Pat Hutchings, from Opening Lines…, 2000

SPECC: Faculty Inquiry Cases

The Core Work of the Project

Cross-College Inquiry Convenings

• Project leads (re connection to department, institution overall)

• Classroom exchanges/observations• Classroom/formative assessments• Faculty inquiry efforts• Data analyses re student progress,

achievement