Advancing a Culture of Teaching Excellence at UMass

Dear Colleagues,  

The work of the CTL never ceases. You hear about our offerings in our newsletter, participate in our many campus-wide and departmental sessions, come to our office for individual consultations, collaborate with us on Faculty Senate councils and committees, and invite us into your classrooms as part of the Midterm Assessment Process (MAP). And yet, you may not be fully aware of our strategic and systematic impact across campus. To make the many facets of our work visible, we’ve compiled this page of statistics and stories to show some of our long-term and more recent efforts. Teaching matters at UMass, and we hope this page gives you some insight into how important it is to us, to you, and to our students.

Warmly,

Brian Baldi

Assistant Provost and Director, CTL 

Our programs and services reach faculty at all career stages, in all schools and colleges, and in every department with three or more teaching faculty.

We are pleased to provide large numbers of faculty members with confidential, context-specific, evidence-based, and data-informed teaching consultations. As appropriate, we also provide seamless hand-offs to, and co-consultations with, our colleagues in IDEAS for pedagogical support on teaching issues that involve technology. 

Some consultations with the CTL benefit from multiple meetings, particularly when addressing challenges of engagement, assessment, and learning. See these interviews with UMass Amherst faculty for some examples of what we can accomplish together through a series of consultations. 

"The Center for Teaching and Learning has been instrumental in my teaching career. Between fellowships, workshops, MAPS, and year long course redesign consultations I have learned so much about teaching, students, and learning. The CTL has supported my work in small and huge ways and they are always up to support whatever new project I am trying. I am so grateful to have such a well resourced and intelligently staffed office on campus." 

"I knew I couldn’t assign a traditional research paper any longer, but I still wanted students to do research, think deeply, and articulate their ideas. I liked the idea of applying a trainee framework for a capstone assignment to replace the paper. I brought the idea to CTL and was really happy with how we transformed it into a full-fledged mock supervision assignment. I would ask the questions and my TA and I would grade the answers on the fly using a 3-point scale rubric developed in consultations with the CTL."

Research has shown that deep, sustained engagement with educational development opportunities can yield years of evidence-based teaching approaches (Connolly, et al, 2016). The organizational impact of high-engagement programming isn't always visible in the short-term, but can be seen more clearly over time.

We advance the culture of teaching on campus by recognizing incredible and inspiring work. We are proud and often in awe of the work you do for our students, and we’re always looking for new ways to acknowledge and share your work with our community and beyond.

Our programming and services support faculty across their professional careers, but some programs attract faculty from specific career stages, such as:

• Early Career: MAP
• Mid-Career: Grants and Awards and Learning Communities
• Late Career: Consultations and PMYR

In 2023, we learned from a series of focus groups with our mid- and late-career faculty that they wanted sustained, meaningful contact with the CTL and greater awareness of our programs. We listened and acted, resulting in...

In recent years, we have enjoyed the pleasure of serving as mentors to faculty participating in the Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship program, and contributed to campus-wide efforts as described below:

Quotidian details sometimes tell another side of the story in the year in the life of a teaching center.