Documenting the parameters of effective SoTL counselling

The Specialized Master in Higher Education Pedagogy (Formasup) organized at the University of Liège (Belgium) aims at the professional development of teachers involved in Higher Education. The training programme gives participants the opportunity to make a full-scale SoTL study (from the implementation of a well-circumscribed course regulation to the assessment of its pedagogical effectiveness by means of the analysis of collected data) of one prominent aspect of their teaching practice. The process of trying out some new pedagogical approach and of discussing its effects on student learning has also to be reported in the form of a scientific paper (including a short review of the relevant pedagogical literature) and presented to a small audience of teacher colleagues. In order to meet the many requirements of such a complex task, each participant benefits from individualized pedagogical counselling. Besides a brief description of the Formasup context, the present contribution proposes brief case studies of three SoTL projects carried out in 2016. The case studies focus mainly on the dynamics of the interaction between teacher and pedagogical counsellor at each constitutive step of the SoTL project with the intention of making out the specificities of counselling applied to first time SoTL experience (time dedicated to and types of counselling activities in relation to the particularities of individual projects). The case studies are then integrated into a bigger picture drawing upon a larger number of counselling experiences over the last four years (from 2013 to 2016). On the basis of the main characteristics of 21 counselling experiences we propose a typology of teacher profiles according to their strategic approach to SoTL and the corresponding input of counselling.