Institutional Change and the Faculty-Driven Center for Teaching Excellence
Abstract
This session offers a case history of an innovative organizational model that allows a Center for Teaching Excellence, or CTE, to disseminate SoTL more effectively among faculty at the departmental, curricular, and course level. The Faculty Senate at the University of Houston helped create a CTE that is faculty-centered and faculty-driven. The UH CTE is multi-disciplinary and collaborative, and committed to a faculty ethos of institutional self-improvement via “organizational learning.” We will argue that, as with all learning, a CTE's model of faculty learning needs to encompass both incremental and transformative approaches. This is because such changes, to succeed at an organizational scale, demand both institutional and individual commitments to new sets of values. Only this level of commitment can overcome the usual obstacles to changing instructional practice institution-wide, and help build up the capacity, in terms of both knowledge and resources, to imagine and implement alternatives to existing practices.
Location
Room 2911
Recommended Citation
Mazella, David and Wells, Dan, "Institutional Change and the Faculty-Driven Center for Teaching Excellence " (2011). SoTL Commons Conference. 83.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sotlcommons/SoTL/2011/83
Institutional Change and the Faculty-Driven Center for Teaching Excellence
Room 2911
This session offers a case history of an innovative organizational model that allows a Center for Teaching Excellence, or CTE, to disseminate SoTL more effectively among faculty at the departmental, curricular, and course level. The Faculty Senate at the University of Houston helped create a CTE that is faculty-centered and faculty-driven. The UH CTE is multi-disciplinary and collaborative, and committed to a faculty ethos of institutional self-improvement via “organizational learning.” We will argue that, as with all learning, a CTE's model of faculty learning needs to encompass both incremental and transformative approaches. This is because such changes, to succeed at an organizational scale, demand both institutional and individual commitments to new sets of values. Only this level of commitment can overcome the usual obstacles to changing instructional practice institution-wide, and help build up the capacity, in terms of both knowledge and resources, to imagine and implement alternatives to existing practices.
