Center for Teaching Excellence

Our Mission

The Seaver College Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) promotes excellence in college teaching in order to achieve deeper student learning. The Center provides academic, instructional, and professional development support to Seaver College faculty. Services provided by the Center include:

• Promoting best practices and new innovations in college teaching
• Aligning current teaching practices with faculty aspirations
• Supporting pedagogical enhancement with cognitive, material, and financial resources
• Encouraging and empowering faculty to produce scholarship on teaching and learning

Additionally, the director of the Center will maintain close working relationships with faculty advisory committees and appropriate administrators to further enhance teaching practices.

Our Vision

The Center for Teaching Excellence supports the University's affirmation that the student, as a person of infinite dignity, is the heart of the educational enterprise and that spiritual commitment, tolerating no excuse for mediocrity, demands the highest standards of academic excellence. In this light, the CTE advocates high-impact, student-centered, and evidence-based pedagogical practices throughout Seaver College.

The Center affirms that excellent teaching grows out of knowledge and skills that can be introduced, developed, and mastered much like the disciplinary knowledge and skills that faculty inculcate in their students. The CTE's resources and services encourage faculty members to become learners themselves, translating enhanced understanding of teaching and learning into enriched teaching practices.

Our Services

Collaborative Activities

The Center for Teaching Excellence offers a variety of group activities around instructional methods, strategies, and issues. Faculty are encouraged to attend the CTE's thought-provoking stand-alone events and hands-on multi-session workshops that produce specific course revisions. Selected in conjunction with the Seaver College community and the higher education community at large, sessions typically address:

• Course planning
• Assignment design
• In-class activities
• Multiple forms of diversity
• Faith and learning
• Emerging educational technologies
• The scholarship of teaching and learning

Individual Consultations

Confidential, individual consultations may be requested with the director of the CTE on topics such as:

• Aligning practices with aspirations
• Developing new courses or assignments
• Interpreting student feedback
• Streamlining classroom management
• Exploring and implementing new strategies and technologies
• Developing new materials in various media
• Documenting teaching activities for peer reviewers
• Engaging the scholarship of teaching and learning