Goals

The Center supports collaborations across traditional boundaries, encourages innovation in pedagogy and promotes sharing of best practices with the intent to make UTEP a national model for excellence in teaching and learning especially for minority and underserved students.

The Center also provides professional development of faculty through formal and informal mentoring activities; seminars on teaching and learning; and facilitation of faculty work groups which are focused on developing effective ways of integrating teaching, research, service, and leadership skills.

The Center works closely with the Associate Deans for Faculty Development in the Colleges and leaders of other units such as Instructional Support Services and the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects to coordinate and market all faculty development activities on campus and ensure that faculty and graduate students are aware of these opportunities.

Specifically the Center works to:

• Provide strategic, effective and responsive support for all university faculty members and teaching assistants who wish to improve their students' learning and prepare them to meet lifelong intellectual, ethical and career challenges.

• Prepare faculty (full- and part-time) and graduate students for effective management and leadership in the classroom environment; provide strategies and support for improvement of course design; implement instructional technology to improve teaching and learning; team teaching; cooperative and collaborative learning strategies; alternative instructional formats (hybrid courses, distance learning, mediated learning); and managing difficult classroom challenges (plagiarism and cheating, classroom climate).

• Prepare instructors and programs for assessment of teaching and of learning outcomes by providing assistance in the areas of Classroom Assessment Techniques, effective testing and grading strategies, effective assignments design, student learning outcomes measurement (of courses and programs), and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

• Prepare instructors to work with diversity in the classroom and teach effectively taking into account the complexities of individual and group identities and interests, including, but not limited to, ethnic background and religious beliefs.