International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 5, Number 1, January 2011
Return to current issues pageEssay About SoTL
Excerpt
Going to the Balcony: Two Professors Reflect and Examine Their Pedagogy
The purpose of this essay is twofold. First of all, we want to emphasize
the value of taking time to reflect on the effectiveness of our teaching
practices, especially when we sense that teaching and learning processes
have become 'stale.' Heifetz and Linsky (2002) equate reflection with
"going to the balcony from the dance floor" to view our actions
from a different perspective, and this is what we attempted to do. Secondly,
we...
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Linda SearbyUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham
Birmingham, Alabama, USA
lsearby@uab.edu
I am an Assistant Professor and Program Chair of Educational Leadership in the School of Education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I teach courses in the foundations of instructional leadership, supervision and mentoring, and action research in the Master's, Ed.S., and Doctoral programs. Before moving to higher education, I served as a teacher (16 years) and elementary principal (10 years) in Illinois, and received my Ph.D. from Illinois State University in 1999. My research interest is mentoring, and I have authored or co-authored 18 articles related to this topic. Currently, I am conducting a phenomenological research study to determine what constitutes a "mentoring mindset." In addition to my work as a professor, I have a consulting business, Peacewood Consulting (www.peacewoodconsulting.com).
Jenny TripsesBradley University
Peoria, Illinois, USA
jtripses@bradley.edu
I teach in the Educational Leadership program at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. My professional background includes 17 years as an elementary classroom teacher, 9 years as an elementary principal and now 12 years as a college professor. Linda Searby and I first met in 1998 in Graduate School. Our dissertation topics were similar and thinking alike has been a theme of our relationship ever since. Linda and I are interested in mentoring from the protêgê perspective and learning new ways to develop "mentoring mindsets" into our graduate students. SoTL seems a good fit for our research interests. Over the past 10 years, I have also been actively involved statewide in Illinois in the redesign process for principal leadership programs.