Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE)

Our vision is that Miami University will engage in scholarly reflective practice at multiple levels, including instructors, students, and our Center. We provide services for instructors that support scholarly teaching. Scholarly instructors set their instructional goals, use research literature to select instructional methods to reach those goals, assess their effectiveness, and reflect/revise their goals and approaches. We provide formative feedback and serve as consultants to individual faculty and departments. We promote assessment of student learning as the engine of continuous improvement. By learning about the outcomes that our students are or are not reaching, we can take appropriate steps to improve our students' learning. When assessment is part of an IRB-approved research project, it can contribute to the scholarly literature on effective pedagogy. Our Lilly Conference and journals inform the Miami community of best teaching practices and provide outlets for educators who choose to contribute to the scholarly literature on teaching and learning. We support instructors to help students learn to engage in scholarly inquiry and become aware of their own thought processes. Such metacognition enables students to evaluate evidence and the perspectives of external authorities critically, construct new knowledge, make their own informed judgments, and act ethically. We support faculty and students so that students will be responsible for acting with academic integrity. We as a Center also embody reflective practice. Our faculty development efforts are informed by recent research and by assessing the effectiveness of our programs. We share the outcomes of our efforts publicly in presentations and publications.