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Strategic Plan

Summary Statement

The past few years have seen campus resources dwindle even as focus on our students' success intensifies. These changes, as well as coming renewals of college administrative personnel and structures, offer the Center for Teaching challenges and opportunities. A growing focus on the importance of teaching and learning to our students' success could bring renewed campus attention to, and investment in, the center's efforts to promote excellent teaching that maximizes student learning, persistence, and success.

In addition to offering a modest array of educational development opportunities (workshops, seminars, academies), in the period 2018–21 the center will aim to advance three goals by carrying out 10 strategic actions.

Goals

1. Foster fruitful conversations about improving teaching. We will enhance the center's role as a facilitator of informal and formal faculty networks dedicated primarily to the discussion and improvement of teaching at the individual and departmental level.
2. Enhance the stature of the Center for Teaching on campus. We will improve awareness among all faculty of the center and its resources, and enhance the reputation of the center as a place offering valuable services and contributing assertively to the academic life of the campus.
3. In partnership with academic departments and other units on campus, advance college goals for student success. We will develop our capacity to support faculty teaching students from particular populations.

Actions

1. Create and maintain an academic liaison program (Goals 1 and 2). With support of department/program chairs, recruit one center liaison for each academic unit who will facilitate information sharing between the center and departments/programs.
   • By conclusion of spring 2018, have liaisons in at least 80 percent of academic units
   • In spring 2018, initiate once-per-semester gathering of center liaisons
   • Regularly assess how/whether liaison program contributes to advancement of center goals.
2. Advance institutional conversations about maximizing the utility and validity of peer teaching evaluations (Goals 1 and 2). The peer teaching evaluation process is both an important tool for pedagogical reflection and self-improvement and an important element of the appointment process. We will support conversations about maximizing the utility and validity of these evaluations for both purposes.
   • Gather documents about departmental practices.
   • Survey faculty about how they value the peer evaluation process and best practices.
   • Generate report and facilitate conversations campus-wide.
3. Regularly bring together the college's teaching award winners (Goal 1). The college's most celebrated teachers have no institutional mechanism through which to collaborate and share ideas, or to engage college conversations about teaching. We will offer loosely structured conversations intended to elicit ideas for new (possibly fundable) initiatives and programming.
4. Implement an Open Classroom Initiative through which faculty have the opportunity to share their teaching methods and activities with colleagues across campus (Goal 1). Several other campuses across the United States (including the CUNY Graduate Center) have created a period in which faculty can invite members of campus into their classrooms; this fosters reflection, conversation, and camaraderie as well as the sharing of strategies.
5. Provide a forum for discussion, workshops, and training in the scholarship of teaching and learning (Goal 1). More intentionally offer programming connecting faculty research and teaching.
6. Create an award that recognizes accomplishment in innovative teaching (Goals 1 and 2). The college has several awards recognizing excellence in teaching. The center will complement these awards with an award recognizing and supporting pedagogical innovation.
7. More effectively disseminate information about resources available through the center (Goal 2).
   • Update the Center for Teaching website with a catalog of books and technology resources available at the center.
   • Investigate the use of a Blackboard organization to share documents and other information with faculty.
8. In partnership with units such as Institutional Research, the Office of the Provost, and the Mellon Mays Transfer Initiative, gather, interpret, and disseminate information about transfer students and teaching methods and classroom practices that may encourage their persistence (Goal 3).
9. In partnership with units such as Mellon Mays, the Black and Latino Male Initiative, and the Office of Diversity and Equity Programs, as well as appropriate academic departments and programs, gather and disseminate practices that support both teaching about diversity and teaching within a diverse university (Goal 3).
10. In partnership with units such as the Office of Disability Services, gather and disseminate teaching practices that support the success of students with both recognized and unrecognized disabilities (Goal 3).