For the last few days I've been participating in the 2005 CASTL conference. It's been a pretty cool experience that helped me get insight into some of the ways people do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (or SoTL, which most pronounce like SO-tul but one guy pronounced to rhyme with bottle). Of course, as a compositionist, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was nothing new—we built our profession on it.

Craig Nelson, one of the featured speakers, presented several key points, but the big one was "sharing" your teaching knowledge with others. Again, not a new idea in Composition, but new for many of the audience. He led us to several models of SoTL research, starting with the "What Works" article. It seems like those kinds of articles might be best shared in updatable, searchable online resources like the Practical Muse. I doodled in my notes, though, that we also needed a "What Bombed" genre, in which we explain our ideas for teaching projects, assignments with an eye toward the challenges these bring.

I also composed a limerick, reproduced here for your amusement. NOTE: I'm using the less common but more-easily-rhymable pronounciation of SoTL (SAW-tull):

There once was a souce who did SoTL
who looked for a good teaching model.
  He said, with a wink,
  I really do think
the answer must lie in a bottle.