Teaching Improvement Grants: Their potential to promote a scholarly approach to teaching

This paper documents how a teaching improvement fund in a research-intensive university exemplifies a scholarly approach to teaching. We describe how the organization of the fund provides professors with the structure to engage in scholarly activities. In other words, professors identify and make explicit their expertise related to teaching, the proposed activity becomes public and the value of the activity is assessed in a variety of ways. In addition, the analysis uses a framework drawn from the literature to assess the extent to which the funding process is a powerful faculty development activity. It thus adds to the very little that has been reported about the effectiveness of teaching grant programs.