Who's afraid of the Scholarship of Teaching?

I discovered a great article on the 'Scholarship of Teaching' from way back in 1999, in an online journal called 'Inventio', published by George Mason University. The article's by a lecturer in English named Randy Bass, and it's called 'The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?'. Bass begins with an elegant appraisal of what it means to have a 'problem' in research, vs. a 'problem' in teaching:

In scholarship and research, having a "problem" is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a "problem" is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation.

From here, he writes candidly about his own teaching, and how a precipitous decline in his students' evaluations of his teaching (after he'd introduced a set of e-learning methods) inspired him to start looking more deeply at his teaching.

This article is full of good models for examining your own teaching, as well as some very interesting teaching techniques. And it's freely available online, not just (as most articles I talk about will probably be) through a subscription service.