SoTL emphasises teaching as an evidence-informed and evidence-based activity. If you are new to SoTL, your first steps may involve taking a more scholarly approach to your teaching practices. This means becoming more evidence-informed about teaching and learning in higher education and the methods you are using.

Initial steps to become more evidence-informed

Engaging with the pedagogic literature-base is an essential first step to taking a more evidence-informed approach to your teaching. As you will know from your disciplinary scholarship, reviewing the literature-base allows us to understand what is already known about a topic and to explore current thinking and research findings. As Glassick et al., (1997) state:

"Scholarship is, in essence, a conversation in which one participates and contributes by knowing what is being discussed and what others have said on the subject."

The points below offer some useful tips if you are new to finding pedagogic literature:

Developing your own evidence-base

Taking an evidence-informed approach also means that you are gathering and drawing on evidence and data available to you to consider the impact on students’ learning of your methods and approaches. An initial step here might be getting more comfortable and familiar with taking an evaluative approach to your practices. The two points below offer some initial steps that might be helpful:

Drawing on evidence already available to you

There will usually be a range of evidence and data being collected as part of any module or learning experience, for example module feedback, attendance data, performance marks, moodle tracking, viewing/usage statistics, SSLC reports, etc. A first step for building your evidence-base may be interrogating this data from the perspective of particular questions that you have about your students' experiences. If you have introduced new activities in a module to promote community building, for example, are they commented upon in module feedback or SSLC reports? Can you track engagement in the activities? What might attendance data suggest? Interrogating already existing data more closely will help to build a more informed picture about your students' experiences and develop the questions that you want to go on to investigate more systematically.

Gathering more evidence and feedback from your students

Extending the range and type of feedback that you gain from your students is another way that you can start to build more informed understandings of their experiences. You might then use the knowledge you gain from this to define more specific questions, topics, themes, etc., that you want to investigate.

Below are some sources that highlight methods you could use to gain feedback from your students:

• Classroom assessment techniques: this guide identifies a range of simple, formative in-class activities that can be used to gain feedback from students about their learning. You might also find this webpage helpful that outlines certain CATs that could be used when evaluating different learning skills.
• Evaluation cookbook: this practical guide was produced by the Learning Technology Dissemination Initiative. Originally created to evaluate online learning, most of the methods it presents can be applied in any context.
• Evaluating teaching development activities in higher education: a toolkit (downloadable from this webpage): whilst this resource was originally produced for educational developers to evaluate CPD activities, it provides a very useful overview of the evaluation process, types of evidence and methods that could be used. Many of the templates provided could also be viewed from a student-learning context.

Taking a more an evidence-informed approach and building the evidence-base about our teaching activities are good first steps for engaging in SoTL and developing our understandings about our students' learning.