Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE)
CTLE promotes and enhances teaching effectiveness and student learning through faculty-centered initiatives, programs, and sessions. The Center also supports faculty success through a well-rounded lens about what faculty must do to thrive in their careers. An array of teaching related sessions and resources are offered for faculty.
What We Do
We empower faculty excellence in teaching to enable career success by intentionally infusing equity and inclusive practices.
How We Do It
- We provide direct services and programs (e.g., professional, pedagogical) and indirect support through collaboration and connection to resources (e.g., opportunities, networks, evidence, and data).
- We serve as institutional change agents to promote equity and inclusion and solve problems through transformational leadership practices in alignment with VCU’s mission and priorities.
- We facilitate inclusive connections, engagement, and investment in the field of faculty development, particularly as related to teaching, across VCU and beyond.
As a resource for the VCU teaching community, the CTLE is committed to supporting faculty in their goals related to teaching and learning. We value the diverse backgrounds, identities, and contributions made by all our VCU faculty members, and cultivate engagement. Our goals are to champion excellence in teaching, promote evidence-based instruction strategies, and support innovative teaching efforts. You can learn more about the areas we address and the values that drive our work by perusing the information below.
- Inclusive Pedagogy and your career: At VCU, we value the richness that a broad range of intersectional diversity brings to our learning, scholarship, and growth as professionals. The CTLE is committed to moving these conversations forward in deep and meaningful ways, to promote social justice, equity, and the dismantling of systemic oppression.
- Inclusive teaching: We are passionate about working with faculty to incorporate inclusive teaching practices and to help you create some of your own innovations that engage students. The CTLE also specifically supports critical pedagogical approaches such as liberatory, anti-racist, feminist, intersectional, queer, and decolonial pedagogies. We know that welcoming and affirming messages and practices of instructors enhances belongingness that can make a difference for marginalized and under-served students. Increasing a sense of belonging for all students - especially those who are underrepresented and marginalized - can positively impact academic success.
- Teaching Across Modalities: New technologies often enhance, as well as challenge, our understanding of how students learn and provide instructors the opportunity to customize course materials and create personalized learning experiences tailored to students’ individual needs. As technology and instructional methods evolve, so do students’ expectations for a learning experience that effectively integrates the latest technological developments and teaching methods into their education. While technology should never be used as a substitute for teaching, it can be used to support specific learning goals you have for your students. The CTLE champions the idea that every instructor can use technology to enhance their teaching in unique, creative, and effective ways. Across campus, faculty are exploring new and interesting ways to integrate technology into their curricula. Additional guidance regarding teaching in various course modalities can be found here.
- Evidence-Based Pedagogy: Evidence-based teaching involves instructional practices that are informed by research that demonstrates a positive impact on student learning. This research-focused approach emphasizes the importance of using evidence to drive course design, guide instructional decisions, and maximize learning. What we perceive as deep learning as instructors may not always be equivalent to deeper learning for the students. CTLE is dedicated to working with instructors to identify, contextualize, and implement evidence to direct our perspectives and approaches when teaching. Evidence-based pedagogy also helps us uncover and unlearn our own myths about learning as educators. Take, for instance, these two common myths:
- Did you know that "learning styles" are actually a myth? Many educators believe in this myth of auditory learners, kinesthetic learners, etc. Not a real thing; instead, there are learning ‘preferences’.
- Did you know that hand-writing class notes (versus typing on a laptop/device) does not necessarily lead to deeper learning? Turns out there are likely many more variables involved.
- Dr. Michelle Miller's work provides valuable insights from cognitive science about how learning really works.
- Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): The scholarship of teaching and learning involves faculty transitioning from being scholarly teachers, to actively applying their research findings on teaching. This process allows faculty to become active scholars who produce meaningful research and share it with the greater academic community. The CTLE values serving faculty with the process of formulating SoTL research questions that explore what they are deeply passionate about, regarding teaching and learning.
- Well-being: Our philosophy of faculty success emphasizes attention to faculty as wonderfully complex human beings. Many faculty share with us the challenges of balancing their busy lives and professional obligations. We strive to provide opportunities for faculty to engage in reflective wellness practices to nourish themselves both intellectually and holistically. When we make time for even small acts of self-care, we model healthy well-being practices for our students.
The CTLE is dedicated to offering resources that help instructors to create effective syllabi and structure their teaching semesters to run smoothly. The information below can guide you in starting on the right track.
Faculty Preparation for Fall 2024
Syllabus best practices tool
Guide to writing your syllabus
Additional teaching and learning resources
Semester Life Cycle resource links
CTLE hosts workshops and sessions, including annual and pop-up events, as faculty needs arise. For example, we regularly host our ‘Conversations About Inclusion’ and ‘Gen AI & Teaching & Learning’ series for faculty throughout the school year. Please visit the links, below, for more information. If you have an idea for a session or workshop focused on an area of teaching and learning that you and others might like to see, please let us know!
For a complete list of upcoming sessions and events this semester, please see our Faculty Affairs events page
Teaching and Learning in the Era of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving technology, directly impacting academia and the dynamics of classroom instruction. To optimize how we can develop a strong understanding of this disruptive resource, leverage its utility in the classroom, and mitigate its inappropriate use, the CTLE welcomes faculty from all schools and colleges to learn more about the nuances of using AI, and its potential role in your courses. CTLE provides resources and programming related to AI, both in and out of the classroom. Included in these resources are:
Generative AI & Teaching & Learning Tool
Addendums to the Gen AI Resource Tool [more details coming soon]
Gen AI Guidelines for Faculty on Teaching & Learning
Gen AI Guideline for Students
Gen AI & Teaching & Learning Series
Faculty Advisory Committee for Gen AI & Teaching & Learning
Conversations About Inclusion Series
This series provides an opportunity to hear about, and share, tips and strategies that help faculty continue engaging students in the classroom. Faculty-student interactions are constantly changing, perhaps now more than ever. With a heightened attention to differences embedded in privilege, our faculty are practicing more nuanced strategies to engage a highly diverse student body. The Conversations About Inclusion Series provides a space for faculty to think deeply and innovatively about interactions with students whose lived experiences vary based on a wide range of ‘differences’ (first gen, region of residence, socioeconomic factors, race, gender, and body ability among many others). By being attentive to these varying lived experiences, faculty can gain understanding of how to better facilitate the learning experiences of students, and integrate our approaches in the classroom, to help students be successful.
Gen AI & Teaching & Learning Series
Starting in fall 2023, CTLE initiated a series on Gen AI & Teaching & Learning. This series serves as a valuable resource for faculty, focusing on the many possibilities and challenges presented by this technology, specifically as related to teaching. Past events in this series have included workshops to introduce faculty to Gen AI basics, implementing Gen AI in course design, discussions of ethics and integrity considerations, among others.
For information on events in these series, click here.
CTLE initiatives cover a broad range of themes related to faculty teaching success. Please see below, for more information:
Stay up to date on the latest in education, teaching, and learning current events and trends:
Inside Higher Ed
The Chronicle of Higher Education
As faculty, you also have access to a wide wide variety of journals that allow you to keep abreast of trends, studies, and important events regarding teaching and learning in higher education. Access them here, through VCU Libraries.
Faculty participants at a GenAI and Teaching and Learning workshop, 2024