Excerpts are from comments made at the March 1, 2011 Ribbon Cutting Ceremony for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning:
Teaching is one of the most fundamental and important missions of the university. The foundation of educational excellence is found in the day-to-day course experiences and interactions between faculty and students.
The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University will be vitally important to sustaining quality educational experiences and promoting the overall mission of Oakland University.
The mission of the Center is twofold: first, to support faculty efforts to improve teaching by creating learning environments in which our diverse student body achieves maximal learning potential, and second, to promote a culture throughout the university which values and rewards effective teaching, and respects and supports individual differences among learners.
Currently, there are a variety of teaching development activities on campus including workshops through Senate committees, incentive grants to revise and develop courses that engage students, faculty learning communities, support for external conferences such as the Lilly Teaching and Learning conference, the OU/Windsor conference on teaching and learning, new faculty orientation,
faculty development opportunities through general education and first year initiatives, and faculty mentor relationships through departments.
However, these efforts are not comprehensive and are not always available to all who teach at Oakland University.
A teaching center will offer a comprehensive support system to faculty as they strive to meet and exceed university criteria to “show substantial evidence of achievement in teaching .”
The experience of peer institutions, the findings of our recent Foundations of Excellence self-study, and evidence gleaned from our own institution’s statistics indicate that a Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning can play an essential and necessary role in enhancing the quality of instruction and improving student retention and success at Oakland University.
This is especially important in an institution that employs large numbers of part-time faculty and which is in the process of hiring numerous new, full-time faculty to replace retirees.
The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning is designed to provide comprehensive development including:
1) Opportunities for faculty to learn about effective and engaging teaching strategies through Workshops, Seminars, Speakers and Panels;
2) confidential consultation to individual faculty;
3) awareness of on-campus resources for improving student learning;
4) opportunities for learning effective teaching strategies online at the desktop;
5) and opportunities to learn about the effective evaluation of teaching.
Establishing a teaching center will offer a systemic agenda to support teaching for the purpose of offering “excellent and relevant instruction” by
coordinating university-wide programs, offering timely instructional assistance and resources to all who are involved in teaching at Oakland University, and fostering principles of research-based best practices.
The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning will help develop a campus culture that recognizes, values and rewards effective teaching.
There are no teachers without students. Ultimately it is only as students learn that one truly becomes a teacher. When we engage our students successfully in learning, we accomplish a key university mission. There are other important missions, but none more important. The teacher/student exchange is the “life’s breathe” of who we are.
This is what the center embraces—quality teaching. How we talk about it. How we plan for it. How we live it. And, how we read and learn from our craft.
In teaching well, we secure a place of belonging and value in the community. Students who are engaged as learners, stay. We know this. This is retention. Students who learn tell their families and friends about us. This is PR. Others come to the university. This is our future.
Teachers inspire students. And, in so many ways, students inspire teachers.
In terms of initiatives, we have two workshops this month one on Best Practices in Service Learning and the other later in the month helping teachers work with students with disabilities. We have many more in the works. Most will take advantage of the “state of the art” instructional technology now available in this Learning Studio. We have plans for next year to have Faculty Fellows to work with colleagues in developing their teaching. We link faculty with national professional development organizations such as POD and the Carnegie Foundation. We work with the entire project of quality teaching—how we know it. How we learn it and how we evaluate it.
Lets not forget that students
walk with their feet
If we build it,
they will come
This is as true of our teaching
as it is of the attractive physicality of our campus
If we build a home in how we teach
the family comes together, the family grows