Institutional Change and the Faculty-Driven Center for Teaching Excellence

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\u27s 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