In the past two decades, centers for teaching and learning have popped up at just about every post-graduate school in North America. But for most of their history, universities and colleges were institutions where disciplinary expertise was established and ultimately disseminated. Teaching—and the study of how students learn—was an afterthought.
By the early 1960s, the thinking around teaching at the university level started to change, rising to become a core mission of many schools. The University of Michigan was a pioneer in efforts to study and support the learning experience on campus, launching its Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) in 1962, the first of its kind in North America.
“It’s gone through several stages,” says Matthew Kaplan, executive director of the CRLT, which works with faculty, graduate student instructors and academic administrators in all 19 schools and colleges that comprise the University of Michigan. “There was a point early on when it was mostly research scientists in psychology. There was some service work, but a lot of attention was paid to psychology research in learning.”
By the early 1980s, according to Kaplan, the focus shifted to boost the center’s service mission: working directly with faculty and graduate students on matters of teaching on campus. Today, the CRLT is responsible for everything from producing and sharing pedagogical research to conducting workshops to evaluating new classroom technologies.
But the growth of the CTL didn’t happen in a vacuum—it’s linked to a shift in the power of the student body. Universities, now increasingly in competition for enrolment, can no longer view students as numbers; instead, they must be treated as customers with specific needs.
And for students looking for more from their university experience than a degree, excellence in teaching is a very strong selling point.
This is an extract from Working with CTLs: A Handbook for Professors.
