Inquiry‐guided learning has widespread appeal for a variety of institutions of higher education throughout the world. As a suite of teaching strategies that defies a simple prescription for practice, inquiry‐guided learning challenges practitioners to develop conceptual frameworks that describe inquiry as a site of student learning rather than of traditional scholarship.

Since the publication of The Boyer Commission Report (1998), inquiry-guided learning, has acquired a certain cachet and is often suggested as a universal answer for various teaching and learning ills, particularly in research universities. However, while the report focused on inquiry-guided learning, it defined the term only generally or chiefly by anecdote. Twelve years later confusion still exists about what inquiry-guided learning really is and how to do it, whether in a single course or across the curriculum. This article offers a review of representative literature on inquiry-guided learning as well as guidelines for classroom and curriculum practice to address this confusion and to offer clarity.

While there has been emphasis on the institution and individual classroom as loci of learning and reform, less attention has been paid to the academic department. However, precisely because its structure is so endemic to institutions of higher education, the academic department may be the most logical and potent site for change. Using a case study approach, this paper examines the conditions under which change in undergraduate education takes hold and flourishes in the academic department, advances the concept of readiness, and explores its implications for those who wish to promote change in the department.

In recentyears researchers have begun toinvestigate the nature ofdisciplinary differences in higher education and their implicationsfor teaching and learning.While researchers have studiedseveralaspects of disciplinary dlfferences, they have given comparatively little attention to the significance ofthese diffirencesforfaculty development. Afterreviewing selective, representative studiesfrom the literature ondisciplinary diffirences, this paper develops ageneralframeworkjOr determining how the characteristics ofa discipline influence the dynamics ofthe consulting relationship using the example ofthe hardsciences. It explores what kinds ofdiscipline-specific knowledge willbe importantfor consultants andunder what circumstances and the implications for effictive consulting strategies. The paper concludes withrecommendationsforfuture research in this area.