Approaches to Biology Teaching and Learning

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Approaches to Biology Teaching and Learning: From aScholarly Approach toTeaching to the Scholarship ofTeaching
From    Deborah Allen* and Kimberly Tanner

We live in a time when the seeds of change in science
education have borne fruit all around us. The rhetoric of the
calls for change issued by national scientific societies and
agencies is supported by the reality of compelling examples
of change, accomplished by scientists who have rethought
the way they teach, the way they think about teaching, and
the way they define themselves as science educators
(Handelsman et al., 2004; Project Kaleidoscope, 2004).
The seeds have germinated in some potentially rocky
soil—including the graduate and postdoctoral training
programs that generate future scientists (Luft et al., 2004).
For many of us who received our preparation for what we
now do as educators before those seeds were sown, however,
our graduate and postdoctoral programs may have done
justice only to our future roles as research scientists. Our
preparation for teaching may have consisted largely of
service as a laboratory teaching assistant, or as the deliverer
of a curriculum designed by others. When faced with the call
to consider the way we teach, we are often on unfamiliar
ground—a ground littered with incomprehensible jargon
and diverse standards for what constitutes best practice.
Should we go back to the figurative school and, in essence,
reinvent ourselves? What is the potential payoff? Dowe really
have the time to take a scholarly approach to teaching, in addition
to the professional demands placed on us in other areas?
The three scenarios presented below are offered as illustrations
of situations in which scientists who teach are poised at
the brink of finding value in the principles and practices that
constitute what is an emerging area of scholarship: the
scholarship of teaching (Hutchings and Shulman, 1999).