That is a question that comes up often: How is research related to my career of teaching? Before I answer that question, let me ask you this: How do you know you’re being a good teacher? Part of the answer you’re likely to give might include information related to best practices in teaching which you’ve heard about through some kind of PD or word-of-mouth from colleagues, or you might base your response on some data you have collected (like student SFQs or stop-start-continue reflections). In both of these cases, you’re answering using research! And that’s how research is related to your job of teaching!
College vs. University
Related to this, you may also be wondering why colleges are interested in research at all (since we’re not universities!). The continued employment of university professors depends on their continued research program, on the very specific area of knowledge on which they are experts. That’s what PhDs are trained to do. In my case for example (if I was at a university and had the appropriate lab space/equipment), I would be continuing to study how ambiguous words are represented in monolingual English speakers (e.g., bank has 2 distinct meanings) as well as across languages in French and English bilinguals (e.g., the grapheme four has different meanings in those two languages). Colleges are different since our tenure and/or promotion doesn’t depend on us engaging in research (more on that in one of my previous posts: October 14th, 2021). Because of this, we are in a unique position to be able to investigate/focus on applied research and examine how students learn best and how what we do in ours classrooms contributes to that through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning or SoTL.
Research in Teaching and Learning
You’re a good teacher because your SFQs says so, right? That’s great! Congratulations! Those are data that you are using to check that you’re doing a good job. If those data change (e.g., students suddenly rate you lower than the college average or lower than they have in the past), you’ll start to wonder why and try to improve your class for your students. And that is research! Because maybe you’re doing things exactly the same, but it’s the students who have changed (e.g., because they have more independent or online skills due to their educational experiences during the pandemic). Or, maybe you’ve changed something and it didn’t work for them, they found it confusing or too much work, or something else might have happened. In each of these cases, a research project can give you a better understanding of what happened, AND also allow others to benefit from the outcome: what did you learn to do/not do different? What is different about students now than in the past? There are many questions that you can answer related to your own practice which can benefit others.
You’ve learned about some cool education technology or approach to teaching/learning at PD, and you’re excited to add it to your teaching toolbox! The reason that this new piece of ed tech or approach has gained traction is because some teacher somewhere has done research to examine its usefulness to student learning. So, why couldn’t you be that teacher? You already use some course policies, activities, approaches, ed tech, in a way that is unique to your course. You could examine these practices and see whether they make a difference. For example, I recently changed by due dates to frame them more positively: rather than having everything due on midnight on Sunday with no late work accepted, I now have everything due by end of day on Friday with an automatic no-penalty extension until Sunday at midnight. As far as my intention of having students turn in everything by Sunday night, both policies are the same, but I think that my new policy sets them up for success because they can have the weekend off to recover and prepare for the following week, get ahead, or catch up as needed. I think that I am getting most of my students to complete their work by the Friday deadline and I think that I know that I have had fewer (i.e., none) requests for extensions on the weekly work. I haven’t yet had a chance to do a research project on this topic, but once I do, I can confirm that what I think is actually true based on the data I have. Are you interested in exploring this specific topic further? Do you want to collaborate with me on a research project? If so, send me an email and we can develop some research questions together and then propose a SoTL research project for next academic year (2023-2024).
Conclusion
I hope you can see how research is directly relevant to what we do in the classroom and how we can use our extensive classroom experience for applied research into SoTL! If there is anything I can do to support your research or if you have suggestions for me in my role as Research Coordinator, please reach out via email or pop in to my virtual “office hours” on Fridays from 12:30-1:30pm in my Whereby room.
