In January, I facilitated an equity-in-teaching workshop called “Demystifying Success” based on the principle that making explicit the “implicit norms and ambiguous processes that characterize college, such as how to be a ‘successful’ student,” will “give students access to the language of the institution and improve their chances for success” (CUE 2020). Participants developed a few brief artifacts designed to make explicit some disciplinary processes that are important in their courses.

To illustrate these artifacts, I created examples. Rather than using my discipline of literary study (which would be well covered by some English colleagues in the workshop), I made examples based on SoTL.

Below, I share the first of these artifacts with a CC-BY-NC Creative Commons license. You may use each to make explicit some important ways of thinking and doing in SoTL, and encourage participants to use it later on as they work on their own SoTL projects.

A SoTL Preconception Check

At the beginning of a SoTL workshop, participants complete this “quiz” in small groups. It’s intended to pique their curiosity, activate their prior knowledge about SoTL, and address some of the persistent misconceptions I’ve encountered over the years.

Click the image to the right (or here) to access my instructions and the 10-question quiz.

In “Demystifying SoTL, Part II,” I share another artifact I created, “Selected SoTL Moves.”