About the CTE
About the CTE
Our Mission:
The Center for Teaching Excellence supports the continuing efforts of all Columbia faculty members to become more informed, confident, creative, and reflective practitioners of the art of teaching, thereby enhancing the quality of learning for a diverse community of students. Established in 1999, the Center for Teaching Excellence advances its mission through its sustained commitment to six interdependent dimensions of our educational environment:
Teaching: The Center engages principles and practices of teaching at the individual, departmental, curricular, and institutional level. By promoting the scholarship of teaching, the Center connects Columbia's unique and dynamic academic culture to national and international dialogues on pedagogy.
Learning: The Center advances understanding of how students learn; how they develop intellectually and creatively; how they become lifelong learners, responsible citizens, and authors of the culture of their times.
Excellence: The Center provides a focus for defining, reaffirming, and celebrating those qualities of mind and heart the College values in its students and teachers; for articulating and explaining our expectations internally and externally; and for assessing our individual and collegial success in achieving our goals for teaching and learning, our aspirations for ourselves and our students.
Community: The Center encourages Columbia's diverse faculty (full- and part-time) to share their perspectives, expertise, talent, and energy with each other on a range of pedagogical issues. Facilitating communication about teaching within and across academic departments, the Center helps faculty consitute a genuine community of learners. The Center also supports faculty in their efforts to teach in ways that engage the vital urban realities, the multiple communities of Chicago.
Creativity: The Center sustains faculty in their work of educating students for creative occupations in diverse fields by helping faculty (re)discover some of the ways in which teaching is itself an art, perhaps, the most demanding and rewarding of all arts. The Center promotes more explicit awareness among teachers and students of good teaching as a profoundly creative process.
Change: The Center promotes meaningful innovations in pedagogy and instruction, perhaps most visibly the strategic use of digital technologies in teaching and learning. Just as importantly, the Center attends to the developmental needs of faculty at different stages of their professional and personal lives, within rapidly changing educational and cultural contexts.
The Center for Teaching Excellence supports the continuing efforts of all Columbia faculty members to become more informed, confident, creative, and reflective practitioners of the art of teaching, thereby enhancing the quality of learning for a diverse community of students. Established in 1999, the Center for Teaching Excellence advances its mission through its sustained commitment to six interdependent dimensions of our educational environment:
Teaching: The Center engages principles and practices of teaching at the individual, departmental, curricular, and institutional level. By promoting the scholarship of teaching, the Center connects Columbia's unique and dynamic academic culture to national and international dialogues on pedagogy.
Learning: The Center advances understanding of how students learn; how they develop intellectually and creatively; how they become lifelong learners, responsible citizens, and authors of the culture of their times.
Excellence: The Center provides a focus for defining, reaffirming, and celebrating those qualities of mind and heart the College values in its students and teachers; for articulating and explaining our expectations internally and externally; and for assessing our individual and collegial success in achieving our goals for teaching and learning, our aspirations for ourselves and our students.
Community: The Center encourages Columbia's diverse faculty (full- and part-time) to share their perspectives, expertise, talent, and energy with each other on a range of pedagogical issues. Facilitating communication about teaching within and across academic departments, the Center helps faculty consitute a genuine community of learners. The Center also supports faculty in their efforts to teach in ways that engage the vital urban realities, the multiple communities of Chicago.
Creativity: The Center sustains faculty in their work of educating students for creative occupations in diverse fields by helping faculty (re)discover some of the ways in which teaching is itself an art, perhaps, the most demanding and rewarding of all arts. The Center promotes more explicit awareness among teachers and students of good teaching as a profoundly creative process.
Change: The Center promotes meaningful innovations in pedagogy and instruction, perhaps most visibly the strategic use of digital technologies in teaching and learning. Just as importantly, the Center attends to the developmental needs of faculty at different stages of their professional and personal lives, within rapidly changing educational and cultural contexts.