Sue Beckingham, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Figure 1: The SoTL Staircase (Beckingham. 2025)

This blog post explores practical ways to make SoTL work visible, aligning with EuroSoTL’s commitment to fostering scholarly teaching and collaborative learning across Europe. By introducing the SoTL staircase, the post offers a framework for educators to share insights at every stage – from informal conversations to formal publications – supporting EuroSoTL’s ethos of inclusive scholarship and focus on innovation and accessibility in scholarly practice.

At a time when evidence-informed teaching and reflective professional practice are gaining prominence, the SoTL staircase (Beckingham, 2025) provides educators with practical approaches to share their work that can help to build both their confidence and the visibility of their scholarly work. Each step reflects a different form of dissemination.

Importantly, every step counts as publication. Whether sharing insights in a blog post, a podcast, or a conference presentation, these are all valuable ways to make practice public and to contribute meaningfully to collective understanding of SoTL.

Reflect, Share, and Grow

Implementing an intervention to enhance student learning and engagement can lead to powerful insights. Sometimes those insights confirm what we hoped to achieve; other times, they reveal what didn’t work and why. Both outcomes are valuable. By reflecting openly on our practice and sharing it with peers, we contribute to a wider conversation that benefits others as well as our own development.

Felten (2013) outlines five principles of good practice in SoTL: inquiry focused on student learning, grounded in context, methodologically sound, conducted in partnership with students, and appropriately public. The SoTL staircase provides a simple way to visualise how we might bring these principles to life by making our SoTL practice visible in different ways.

Sharing Informally

You can begin by sharing your work in informal conversations with colleagues or during teaching team discussions.

Why it matters:

• Offers a low-stakes space to explore ideas and gain feedback.
• Encourages reflection and refinement before creating formal outputs.
• Builds networks and a community of practice.

Create Accessible Resources

After sharing ideas informally, you might find it useful to capture these by creating accessible resources that can reach a wider audience. For example how-to guides, blog posts and infographics, or capture as a podcast.

Why it matters:

• Makes ideas accessible to broader audiences in engaging, digital formats.
• Demonstrates openness and experimentation in sharing practice.
• Extends the reach of your work beyond immediate colleagues, often much faster than a journal publication.

Develop a Case Study

The next stage may be to consider sharing beyond your institution as a short digital case study, video or screencast or digital poster.

Why it matters:

• Strengthens clarity of ideas through structured storytelling.
• Provides an opportunity for peer review and external feedback.
• Builds visibility and confidence in sharing practice.

Present at an Event

Presenting your work at a conference is a great way to meet other people and let them hear about your work. This could be as an oral presentations, panel discussion or exhibition.

Why it matters:

• Enhances confidence in communicating ideas and responding to feedback and critique.
• Enables dialogue with others engaged in similar SoTL work, potentially beyond your own institution.
• Opens doors for collaboration, cross-institutional projects, and co-authored outputs.

Publish in Books or Journals

Whilst the afore mentioned may be sharing work in progress, there will be a point where you want to capture your scholarly practice more fully. At this stage you can consider publishing your work as a journal article or a book chapter. It is useful to look out for calls for themed edited collections that align with your focus.

Why it matters:

• Demonstrates an extended depth of scholarship.
• Contributes to institutional and disciplinary knowledge.
• Offers recognition for research-informed teaching and scholarly practice.

Valuing Each Step

It may be that you choose to present your work at a conference as poster and are then invited to expand on this as a podcast. Or you have had a journal article published and choose to write a summary blog post or outline the key points by creating an infographic.

Whatever step you take next, remember that each act of sharing your practice is an act of scholarship and contributes to our collective understanding of learning and teaching. Including students as partners in that process (Healey et al., 2014; Cook-Sather et al., 2014) adds further value, so do consider co-creating some of the outputs.

References

Beckingham, S. (2025). SoTL staircase. National Teaching Repository. Figure. https://doi.org/10.25416/NTR.29438096.v1

Cook Sather, A., Bovill, C. and Felten, P. (2014) Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty. Jossey Bass.

Felten, P. (2013). Principles of good practice in SoTL. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 121–125. https://doi.org/10.2979/teachlearninqu.1.1.121

Healey, M., Flint, A. & Harrington, K. (2014) Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. AdvanceHE. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/engagement-through-partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher