Many teachers in secondary education base their teaching on their own experiences. However, there are problems with our current wisdom of practice (see, for example, Weimer, 2001; 2008). First, most practitioner scholarship on teaching and learning is not work that is part of integrated streams of research where findings lead forward to new findings. It is written to improve practice. The success of many techniques and approaches (as well as the failure of others) can often be explained in terms of well-known and documented theories or principles. Secondly, the wisdom of practice often is not well connected to empirical outcomes. Thirdly, there is seldom any sense of why some strategies, techniques, approaches or practices work in some contexts and not in others. This probably is related to the lack of teachers’ systematic inquiry of the effects of their teaching, but also to the culture of isolation of teaching in secondary education. Teachers who are able and willing to share their knowledge and experiences with their colleagues, stimulate a learning culture in a school (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2003). So, teachers generally are not well informed about effective methodologies, they reinvent new practices, and they do not grow beyond their own practices and experiences. Although appealing to a small fraction of the school teachers, the scholarship of teaching includes a kind of scholarly research, grounded in theories and literature on teaching and learning, and shared with colleagues for critique and peer review. In this paper, we will present the results of a systematic review of international literature on the scholarship of teaching answering the following questions: 1. How can the scholarship of teaching in secondary education be described? 2. How can the scholarship of teaching be designed in order to efficiently and effectively affect teaching and research? 3. How is the scholarship of teaching related to teaching and teachers’ research?

International literature will be selected from literature databases commonly used in educational research using combinations of search terms such as ‘scholarship of teaching’, ‘disciplined inquiry’, ‘research’, ‘teaching excellence’, and ‘teaching expertise’. Only manuscripts from peer-reviewed journals and other manuscripts of good quality (assessed by the authors in an audit-like procedure, see Akkerman, Admiraal, Brekelmans, & Oost, 2008) will be included in the literature review. This selection of literature will be mapped using the matrix method of Miles and Huberman (1994). The rows of the final matrix will be formed by characteristics of the studies (e.g., the nature of the problem addressed, research design, methods of data gathering, data analysis); the columns will be formed by various descriptives of scholarship of teaching, design principles, and effects on teaching or research; in the cells we will summarize the conclusions of the literature selected.

Based on a full matrix, the international literature on the scholarship of teaching will be described and evaluated. The results of this review will be presented at the conference. Moreover, we will go into recent developments of evidence-based teaching perceiving school teaching as clinical practice. This means that -as in academic medical centres- school teachers carry out both teaching and educational research, resulting in more evidence-based teaching in secondary education. Such a development has tremendous implications for professional development of both teachers and researchers: teachers should develop research skills and attitudes and the researchers should be interested in becoming teachers. Based on our review of the international literature on the scholarship of teaching we will go into the possibilities of school teaching as clinical practice.