From overhead projectors to AI: 20 years of the Center for Teaching and Learning

First announced in a State of the University address by then-president Bob Kustra, the Center for Teaching and Learning is celebrating its 20th anniversary of providing resources for faculty to effectively educate their students.

As educational technology, expectations of faculty and the make-up of the student body have evolved, so too has the center's work to create environments where faculty, and ultimately students, can be successful.

Meeting the needs of faculty at a growing university

The center opened in the fall of 2006 under founding director Susan Shadle, currently vice provost for undergraduate education. Shadle held the director role for 16 years. She explains that the center's goal was to support faculty who found the expectations of them shift as the university rose in prominence.

"When we hire people to teach at Boise State, we are often asking them to do many, many different things," she said. "And as our institutional research profile has grown, the pressure on faculty to be doing all the things that we ask of faculty outside of teaching has also grown."

The Center for Teaching and Learning was founded to support being a research university that also values and supports effective teaching - making sure that the core mission of supporting student learning doesn't get lost for faculty.

"Boise State should be a place where we're going to celebrate you as being a rock star researcher, and we're going to expect and celebrate that you're an amazing teacher," Shadle said.

The dual purpose of the center

Daniel Sanford, current director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, sees the center as filling two roles: as a body that makes sure teaching and learning initiatives get implemented in the classroom where they support every student, and as a source of support for individual instructors.

"There is so much great academic support for students at Boise State, but most of it only helps students if they take advantage of it," he said. "Classroom initiatives are different because they affect every single student."

The center supports individual instructors in strengthening their teaching while also helping those individual efforts add up to broader improvements in the classroom experience of students across the university.

Narrowing that focus to individual instructors, Sanford said that objective is driven by a quirk of institutions of higher education.

"If you're a K-12 instructor, it's impossible to go into your career without having training in teaching and learning, but it's very possible in higher education," he said.

Many instructors come directly from professional fields and are experts in their discipline, but may never have had experience teaching or teaching training. The center is there to fill that gap.

"It's not really about telling people what to do in the classroom," he said. "It's about helping them ask the right questions: 'Is what I'm doing working, what are my goals, what are the best methods to accomplish those goals?'"

Sanford said the center facilitates this by drawing on research about teaching and learning - what evidence suggests about how students learn and what works in the classroom - and making that research useful and accessible to faculty who are immersed in other fields of scholarship.

Multiple access points for faculty

Leading faculty development programming for instructors is Theresa Focarile, director of educational development. She sees the center as a partner in faculty success.

"I hope that all faculty on campus know that we are here to help them reach their goals for teaching their students and to help make their work easier," she said.

The goal of supporting all faculty means offering programming in varied formats and settings. From intensive course design programs to targeted work like mid-semester assessments, to one-off consultations with individual faculty members.

"I want there to be a way for every instructor to access resources that support their needs or meet them where they are, whoever they are as a learner," Sanford said. "I think the perfect suite of CTL programming has, for whatever question you're interested in, or whatever you're working on as an educator, multiple things that give you multiple ways to meet that need."

Nicole Molumby is a professor in the Department of Music who has worked with the center on a variety of projects.

"I always reach out to the CTL for help in developing processes to lead faculty teams through large curricular revisions," she said. "Their help in long-term planning as well as course design support is a huge help to me and my faculty to think through revisions clearly and thoughtfully, always keeping the student as the center of our focus."

One transformative project Molumby was a part of was the Mobile Technology Faculty Group, where she received 50 iPads that were given to the freshman music major cohort. The project integrated iPads and low-cost mobile apps into an aural skills course, giving students flexible access to resources that connected in-class instruction with independent practice, improving student engagement.

This was in 2010, and now mobile technology is fully integrated into the classroom and as normalized as pen and paper or a laptop, she said.

The impact on students

After 20 years of evolution in teaching - from smartphones and ipads to AI and remote learning - the core reason to have a center for teaching and learning remains the same.

"It's to support faculty to be successful, and then that will support students to be successful," Shadle said.

This means being adaptive, meeting students where they are and incorporating their perspective into the Center for Teaching and Learning. That student perspective can also help faculty see their courses differently and better understand how students are experiencing their learning.

One example of this is the CTL Student Partners program, which gives students an active voice in the center. This group of undergraduate students work with Boise State faculty on course design, helping faculty understand how students are experiencing their courses. Sanford said this group has become an ad hoc student cabinet for him.

This connection of faculty, and their teaching, to the students is one of the most rewarding things for the center's staff.

"It's great to see all of the people at Boise State who are focused on and excited about teaching their students well and making sure they have great experiences in the classroom," Focarile said. "It's probably my favorite part of the work, just knowing that we help all of those experiences happen and help the faculty make those experiences happen."

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