Sharing Your Teaching

Disseminating Pedagogy in Scholarly Venues and Beyond

Whether we are early in our teaching careers or more experienced, we likely have teaching practices that have worked well and practices we have revised and improved.  One way to reflect and get the most out of all we have put into our teaching is to share it: share our teaching ideas and resources with colleagues, institutions, professional groups, and larger networks. Such sharing emphasizes teaching as a social act, learning with others by hearing their responses to further tinker with our teaching. This teaching tip pulls back the curtain on the teaching tips you have been reading and considers what you might have to share in this space and in others. 

Why and How to Share

Making teaching social.
Teaching can be solitary when only left to the classroom's walls. Talking with other faculty in your department, institution, discipline, and beyond can help us process and learn how to get the most out of our teaching to benefit both students and ourselves. Suggest a department meeting or additional forum to share teaching ideas, values, and approaches. Share teaching ideas and questions in discipline listservs. Participate in CETL discussions, or lead a Teaching Talk where you can share something that is working well or organize a discussion on a sticking point. Such spaces can germinate new ideas or collaborations.

Making your work visible.
If you have a teaching idea that colleagues have continually found useful or that you mention often, make this work visible so others can find it and you can share it with others directly. When you share a teaching tip through the CETL Teaching Tips blog, 700 OU faculty will receive it in their inbox, and it will be housed on the blog. Additionally, posting ideas on your personal website allows you to build an archive of teaching resources. Larger publications like Faculty Focus increase the visibility of practice-based short articles about teaching.

Work can be visible in a variety of formats, such as short videos on YouTube (such as CETL’s YouTube channel) or Vimeo or by tuning in to and being a guest on higher ed podcasts. Christina Moore (CETL) and VaNessa Thompson (CMI) have been on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, and Bridget Kies and Amanda Nichols Hess have been on the ThinkUDL podcast. 

Making your work scholarly.
The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) recognizes teaching as scholarly work and encourages faculty to use research to better understand their own teaching practices and to share their research results with the broader educational community. CETL has identified a few teaching and learning journals of interest among a large database from Kennesaw State University.

Conferences also provide an important venue for scholarly dissemination. As with any scholarship, some faculty share work at a conference before publication, while others only present published work. CETL curates teaching and learning conferences that offer accessible options in terms of cost, format, and location. For more guidance on conferences to attend or other ways to develop and disseminate your teaching work (e.g. publications), reach out to CETL.

You can see the work of colleagues across campus on CETL’s Research, Scholarship, and Recognition page, including a page of SoTL work by OU faculty and staff.

Practicing open pedagogy.
Open pedagogy is the practice of making work as widely accessible as possible and encouraging a culture of openness (while also making clear how your work can be used through a Creative Commons license). The open educational resources piece may get the most attention for offering no-cost learning materials, but this is only one facet of open pedagogy. CETL’s Open Educational Resources Guide offers ways to learn more about OER and Open Pedagogy, and OU Scholarly Communications librarian Julia Rodriguez supports faculty opening access to their scholarship.

Engaging in critical pedagogy.
Critical pedagogy pushes against teaching and learning norms, particularly as they relate to social justice issues. If you have a growing sense that teaching in higher education should be done differently and that our routine and assumptions are suspect, engaging in wider discussions among faculty can help us explore critical perspectives, share ideas and materials, and work to reconstruct teaching norms accordingly. 

These opportunities for sharing your teaching are not intended to add work for productivity’s sake, but to get the most out of the work you have already done and to energized to continue the good work of teaching.

Save and adapt a Google Doc version of this teaching tip.

About the Author

Written by Christina Moore, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Photo by Amador Loureiro from Unsplash. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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