Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Carnegie Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
at Northern Essex Community College

In 2002, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) selected twelve cluster leaders nationwide to take the lead in the development of a project to support the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Middlesex Community College was selected as a cluster leader. Seven colleges partnered to create an evolving, interdisciplinary community of practice focusing on the common mission of studying learning.

Our first collaboration included Northern Essex Community College, Middlesex Community College, Fitchburg State College, Salem State College, Holyoke Community College, Valencia Community College (Florida), Iowa Western Community College and Pine Manor College. Each college created a SoTL group on campus. Our Carnegie cluster was called COPPER (Communities of Practice: Pooling Educational Resources). During our three years together, we built a foundation for our COPPER cluster. We visited each others’ campuses, sponsored a SoTL conference that attracted over 300 people, communicated with each other on our newly created blog and fostered lasting relationships with new colleagues.

In 2006, NECC was accepted into the Institutional Leadership Program of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (CASTL) along with former and new colleagues from MA including Middlesex Community College, Pine Manor College, Salem State College, and our new partners Glendale Community College (California) and Minnesota State University.

The program's formal launch took place in November 2006, in conjunction with the third annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teahcing & Learning (ISSOTL) held in Washington, DC. Reprsentatives from all CASTL institutions met for a full day to discuss goals for the three years of project work, meet with others around common themes, and strategize about how to use the principles of the scholarship of teaching and learning to advance crucial institutional agendas for student learning and teaching excellence.

Our cluster work, collaboration, assessment of student learning, and models of SoTL work on our campuses has grown and been refined during our early years allowing us to go forward with new zeal and some wisdom from lessons learned.

SoTL Fellows at NECC

To build on the work of our first COPPER cluster, NECC launched its first SoTL group in the spring of 2004. The Teaching & Learning Center, in collaboration with Academic Affairs, provided faculty an opportunity to begin their SoTL work.

At NECC, we created a community of practice for faculty who wished to explore teaching and learning and study their craft in a collaborative environment of colleagues. In the community college, faculty members are committed to teaching, but due to large course loads have little time for the reflective practice and scholarly research that sustains and energizes teaching and learning. In addition, rarely do faculty members have the opportunity to benefit from peer review which can often seem burdensome instead of beneficial.

The deliberate process of studying and researching student learning, opening this work to critical review, and sharing ideas set the stage for more thoughtful approaches to teaching and learning. The focus on assessment central to SoTL helped faculty appreciate assessment as part of a thoughtful inquiry into student learning.

Our first project supported eight, full-time faculty who came together for three semesters and shared their work through discussion, common readings, the development of scholarly research and the refinement of individual project goals.

In the spring of 2006, we began our work in the CASTL Leadership Project and offered an opportunity to a new group of faculty to participate in the NECC SoTL project. The 2007 faculty fellows completed their projects in July 2007 and their research projects are now available online.