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Improving teacher training
Center for Teaching Excellence will train and evaluate faculty

By David J. Craig

University faculty will soon brush up on an aspect of their profession that they might not have covered in graduate school: teaching.

In addition to making professional development workshops available to all BU instructors on subjects ranging from course design to multimedia lecture enhancements, the Center for Teaching Excellence will collaborate with individual schools and colleges at the University to improve teacher evaluations, which organizers say should boost the results of accreditation reviews. It is scheduled to open next fall.

	Courses offered next fall through the new Center for Teaching Excellence, says Executive Director Sharon Prado, will emphasize not theory, but "case studies and real-life, relevant lessons." Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

"The purpose of this center is to provide faculty and teaching fellows with assistance, resources, and encouragement for them to excel as teachers and to underscore the importance of excellence in teaching," says Provost Dennis Berkey. The center will also "build mechanisms to assess both teaching and whether our program itself improves undergraduate education," according to Sharon Prado, the center's executive director and director of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

Next September, the center will offer an orientation program for new faculty as well as workshops for all faculty members on handling plagiarism and a course entitled Teaching TAs How to Teach. It will also offer teaching consultations, including videotape analyses of lectures and classroom observations, a mentoring program whereby senior faculty members share their experiences with younger peers, and courses on different learning styles.

Some courses will be discipline-specific, others will not. An emphasis, Prado says, will be courses that "aren't just about process and theory, but ones that use case studies and real-life, relevant lessons."

The Center for Teaching Excellence will also serve as a clearinghouse for information about professional development opportunities that already exist at BU through individual schools and colleges. Faculty members who wish to learn how to build a course Web site or distribute reserve readings or course packets electronically, for instance, would be directed to Network Information Services, which offers such training and will work closely with the new center.

"The center will not have all the answers or be the place where all the resources reside," says Prado. "The idea is that we'll be a liaison with things that are already in place. Some schools and colleges have an organized approach to professional development and some don't. For instance, the School of Social Work has had its own teaching effectiveness program for about three years, and some deans have department chair retreats, where they do training. But professional development at BU has waxed and waned in the past, and there is definitely a need for a central programmatic effort to develop faculty as professional teachers."

The center's programs will be developed in the next few months, when Prado will look at similar centers at other universities, meet with the deans of BU's colleges to determine their needs, and work closely with a 20-member advisory board headed by College of General Studies Dean Linda Wells. Surveys completed recently by the Faculty Council and Network Information Services will also be used. The questionnaires solicited faculty members' attitudes toward teaching and their technology needs.

The center will likely assist in the development of a standardized method of administering teaching evaluations.

"This is not a center to fix bad teaching," Prado says. "So whatever we decide on in terms of incentives for faculty to get involved in the center's programs, they'll be proactive, not punitive. We know that professors are busy and the last thing they need is one more thing to do. Any classroom technology enhancements are very time- and labor-consuming. But hopefully people will see that this will make their jobs as teachers just a bit easier."

The center was established on the recommendation of a faculty committee appointed by the Faculty Council and Berkey in 1998. It will be located at 143 Bay State Road and be funded through the University's general operating budget. The center will report to the Office of the Provost.

The organizational structure of the center includes two codirectors, an academic director and the executive director, who will administer continuing programs and manage the center's support services. A member of the BU faculty will be appointed to a two-year term as academic director, and will provide leadership in program development and evaluation. Berkey and Prado are currently recruiting an academic director and members of the advisory board.

To apply for the position of academic director of the Center for Teaching Excellence or for membership on the advisory board, or to nominate another faculty member, call Sharon Prado at 353-2020 or e-mail her at prado@bu.edu.

3 October 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations