For an activity to be designated as scholarship,” argues Lee Shulman, the President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “it should manifest at least three key characteristics: It should be public, susceptible to critical review and evaluation, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one’s scholarly community.” These are the core components of all forms of scholarship, and the features by which “scholarship properly communicated and critiqued serves as the building blocks for knowledge growth in a field” (5). p. 2

attention to teaching was occasioned by a crisis. Three years ago, after introducing a number of experimental “electronic literacy” components into my courses, my teaching evaluations plummeted. I now know that this is not too uncommon when teachers significantly revise their teaching, especially involving educational technology. p. 3

In this process of reflection and redesign, I resolved to make every course component intentional. That is, I tried to articulate for myself the reasoning behind every aspect of the course, especially the connections between technology and discipline-based pedagogy. In doing so, I found myself asking questions about student learning I had never asked before. For a decade I had had good success as a teacher: positive feedback, strong evaluations, evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) that students learned something in my courses. p. 3

Yet, I now realized I knew very little about why certain students did better than others. Or, more generally, I knew very little about how students came to know the material I was teaching. Ever since graduate school I had taught mostly the way I had been taught, and tended to replicate the pedagogies that worked best–quite frankly–on me (or slight variations of me). Now that I was trying to change my teaching radically, those naturalized teaching methods and the assumptions behind them were exposed to be without any clear scaffolding or support by the evidence of learning, however sound or useful some of the approaches were. p. 3

Understanding and Mastery p. 3

This point was most driven home to me as I reflected on what I knew and didn’t know about how students developed what Howard Gardner calls a “deep understanding” of my subject. Looking at my discipline through my own eyes only, I assumed that “understanding” was equivalent and coextensive with mastery. I assumed that students in a particular course achieved understanding (in the space of a semester) by replicating a partial and incomplete version of mastery (a mimicry of mastery) that was like the understanding that developed across a whole course of study. Upper division majors were just farther along in this journey of mastery, with the depth of their mimicry ever more convincing. Either way, I imagined that every student, freshman or senior, major or not, was engaged in some version of the mastery of knowledge model that in its completeness was designed primarily to produce English teachers. p. 3

For example, I realized I didn’t know really if the better students in a course who demonstrated a real understanding of the material by the end of the semester were actually acquiring that understanding in my course, or were merely the percentage of students who entered the course with a high level of background and aptitude. Similarly, I realized I didn’t really know if the students who I watched “improve” from their early work to later work were really understanding the material and the paradigm from which I was operating, or merely learning to perform their knowledge in ways that had adapted to my expectations. (Or, for that matter, I wasn’t sure if there was any meaningful difference between understanding and performing understanding; or as Tom Hatch, a scholar at the Carnegie Foundation is always asking, I didn’t know if “understanding” was the most important learning goal at all times anyway). p. 4

As the “crisis” part of this story resolved, I turned to the task of documenting what I had learned in a “course portfolio.” When I focused on the process of recording and framing what was happening in my courses, I was struck by the thinness of resources on which I could draw for help in analyzing the nature of learning in my discipline. I realize now that the gaping quality of my questions was rooted in both the nature of teaching itself and the culture of the academy. Grant Wiggins puts it well in an essay, entitled “Embracing Accountability”: p. 4

Teaching, by nature, is an egocentric profession in the sense Piaget used the term: we find it difficult to see when our teaching isn’t clear or adequate. We don’t easily imagine how what is so obvious and important to us cannot be equally so to novices. Combined with our strong desire to cause learning and to find any evidence of success, we are prone to unending self-deception. How easily we hear what we want and need to hear in a student answer or question; how quickly we assume that if a few intelligent comments are made, all students get the point. This is the tragic flaw inherent in trying hard, and for the right reasons, to get people to understand and value what we understand and value. It then often doesn’t occur to us that students are trying equally hard to appear knowledgeable (5). p. 4

Let me briefly describe two dimensions here. The first is what I came to call in my own practice the “inverted pyramid.” In reconstructing my courses, and in asking myself how students come to understand what they do, I was led to a set of subsidiary questions. I asked myself what specifically were the four or five learning goals that I had for students in a particular course (as opposed to purely teaching goals or content/coverage goals)? Then I asked myself: p. 5

What did I really believe (and what did I know) about what percentage of students were achieving all of the goals, some of the goals, one or two of them? If I had to pick one of these learning goals or outcomes as the one thing that students would retain from this course after leaving it, what would it be? Thinking about that one goal, then, could I honestly say that I spent the most amount of time in the course teaching to the goal I valued most? p. 5

One focus of my ongoing inquiry is now on the problem of teaching more directly to the student learning goals I value most. For me, in my own subject and pedagogical practice, that entails (to state it briefly) a combination of constructivist pedagogies–including work with electronic archives and hypertext writing tools–that engage students more actively with the complexities of textual form and contextual meaning, even at the expense of more traditional kinds of coverage. The general problem of teaching for understanding has led me to wonder specifically about the extent to which students’ prior understandings of a field–its deep structures and assumptions, not just its facts and principles–situate a person to acquire new knowledge. p. 5

I find myself returning to questions about the relationship between student prior understanding and their capacity to acquire new understanding, as a problem worth pursuing for my own scholarship of teaching. In this line of inquiry I want to learn more not only about my students’ entering knowledge, but how their selfawareness of learning might help them develop a deeper understanding of certain disciplinary principles more quickly and meaningfully. p. 6

I instituted for the first time an opening day reflective exercise that asked students to read and respond to a set of documents similar to those we would be working with throughout this interdisciplinary course on the culture and history of the 1890's. I had been using opening day inventories for years. In these I would ask questions about previous literature courses, what books students had read by the authors we would be reading, and how much experience they had working with new technologies (all valuable opening day data); this time I asked questions that attempted to elicit from students what they knew–and what they thought about what they knew– p. 6

regarding the kind of work we would be doing. In this opening exercise I directed them to three different cultural/historical artifacts: a poem, a photograph, and a review of a stage play from the 1890's. I asked them to answer the following questions about each artifact: p. 7

1. What do you see here? Describe the document/artifact in terms of content, without being interpretive. 2. What do you think you know about this document based on reading it and any previous knowledge? 3. What do you think the document reveals about its era/ What kinds of information can be learned from the document? (There might be more than one kind of information). 4. What don’t you know about the document? What questions would you ask about it? 5. If you were going to do further research on this document on the World Wide Web or in the library, how would you go about it? 6. What knowledge or skills are you bringing to this course from other learning experiences you’ve had that help you make sense of these documents? p. 7

The exercise took a long time. I gave them more than hour. In fact it took the entire balance of the opening day after the general introduction to the course. p. 7

What I learned was in part diagnostic. I learned which students had what kind of background (or background they remembered) in the period and in history and literature. But I learned much more than that. Their responses revealed a great deal about their assumptions of what it meant to look at and derive information from historical documents. p. 7

On the last day of class I handed back their opening day responses, asked them to look at the same three artifacts and to look at what they wrote on the first day. On this day I asked them how their response to these artifacts would be different now, what they had gained from the course that helped them read the documents more knowledgeably, and what they were taking away from the course that would help them in another course about culture and history. With this reflection, (again without going into any detail here) I was able to see a change in their rhetoric about the complexity of textual meaning, and in their perceptions about the components of the course that led to that change. p. 8

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. The range of questions may take many different forms. The nature of the data may be quantitative or qualitative; it may be based on interviews, formative assessment instruments, test performances, student evaluations, or peer review, or any combination by which the “multiples of evidence” may be obtained. The nature of the scholarly design could vary from tracking three students of ranging abilities from the beginning of the semester to the end, to studying group dynamics in videotape of student collaborative work, to comparing and contrasting content analysis of student written work across semesters. The object of analysis may range from the acquisition of basic skills to the development of personal values or the transformation of whole knowledge paradigms. p. 8

I agree with Diana Laurillard's claim in her book, Rethinking University Teaching, that “teaching is not a normative science” (8). p. 9

References and Acknowledgements p. 9