The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Collective at UNT Health

Building a sustainable, faculty-led model for translating clinical teaching into scholarly inquiry.

Context

Health sciences faculty at UNT Health were doing extraordinary teaching — but their innovations rarely traveled. Clinical educators carry deep content expertise, hard-earned classroom intuition, and meaningful student outcomes worth studying.

Yet the institutional structures that translate everyday teaching into scholarly inquiry were missing. There was no cross-school Community of Practice, no shared Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) infrastructure, and no entry point for faculty who wanted to study their own teaching without committing to a full research stream on top of already-full clinical and instructional workloads.

The cost of this gap is well-documented: faculty burnout, fragmented innovation, and the persistent invisibility of teaching scholarship in promotion and tenure conversations. Without intentional structures, practice and scholarship stay separate.

Challenge

The work was not to start a new program. The work was to build a sustainable structure that bridged the practitioner–scholar gap for clinical educators — and to do it without adding to their workload, without depending on a single charismatic leader, and without producing the kind of half-finished initiatives that erode faculty trust in faculty development.

That meant designing for three constraints at once:

• Low overhead — so faculty would actually participate, and continue participating after the first semester.
• High trust — so the community could be candid about teaching, including what was not working.
• Visible scholarship — so participation translated into the artifacts (presentations, publications, awards) that count for careers.

Approach

I designed and launched a hub-and-spoke Community of Practice model with five interconnected CoPs anchored to a shared scholarly infrastructure. The hub provides shared methods, IRB-aligned research design support, and a public-facing scholarship pipeline. The spokes are autonomous communities organized around the questions faculty actually want to study — game-based learning and high-impact practices, AI in health sciences teaching, pedagogical wellness, curricular innovation, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning itself.

Several deliberate design moves shaped the model:

• Lightweight onboarding. New members join a CoP in under sixty minutes, with a one-page SoTL primer and a single guided meeting. Optionality is preserved at every step — no mandatory meetings.
• Annual SoTL Unconference. A faculty-led, agenda-emergent convening that makes the work visible and brings new members into the community. Held in 2025 and 2026.
• IRB-aligned project scaffolding. Every active SoTL project is supported with research-design templates that anticipate IRB review, lowering the activation cost for first-time SoTL scholars.
• Cross-institutional storytelling. Findings travel beyond UNT Health through conference presentations, multi-institutional collaboratives, and contributed scholarship — so faculty see their work circulate in the field.
• Connected funding streams. Grant-funded sub-initiatives (most recently the POD Network–funded Pedagogical Wellness study) operate as CoPs themselves, threading external resources into the Collective’s infrastructure.

Outcomes

In two academic years, the Collective has produced:

Beyond the headline numbers, the most meaningful outcome has been cultural: SoTL is now a normalized conversation at UNT Health, no longer the work of isolated faculty pursuing teaching scholarship on their own time.

My role

As founder and lead, I designed the operating model, secured institutional sponsorship, recruited CoP leads, established the IRB and methodological infrastructure, and continue to facilitate the cross-CoP convenings and Unconferences.

The work spans instructional design, project management, qualitative research, and faculty development — and is, in practice, an exercise in how to make scholarship sustainable for the people doing the teaching.

What I learned, and what’s next

The single most important design decision was refusing to add another mandatory meeting. Faculty trust is built when participation respects their time and produces visible artifacts.

The hub-and-spoke model is now being studied as a transferable design pattern for health sciences institutions interested in launching their own SoTL infrastructure.

Currently in development: a published account of the Collective’s model, expansion of the Pedagogical Wellness CoP into a microcredential, and continued integration of responsible AI use as a SoTL question — not as an institutional mandate, but as something faculty can study, refine, and shape on their own terms.

Selected artifacts

• Conference presentation: Nurturing a Culture of Innovation in Health Science Education: Best Practices from the SoTL Collective (TxDLA 2025, Denton, TX).
• Welcome address: SoTL Unconference 2025, UNT Health, Fort Worth, TX.
• Funded grant (connected work): Promoting Pedagogical Wellness Through a Community of Practice: A Scalable Faculty Development Model — POD Network Early Researcher Grant, 2025–2026.
• Institutional recognition: Department of Educational Development — 2026 TxDLA Outstanding Commitment to Excellence and Innovation in Digital Learning Award.
• Related projects on this site: Pedagogical Wellness CoP & Microcredential · Project Management for IDs Collaborative · ID2ID Peer Mentoring