diverse gathering of new faculty with school mascot in the center on a lawn

The Center for Teaching Excellence

Our Center offers all Kean educators a destination for building community and improving their teaching praxis. We strive to develop a culture of pedagogical excellence.

Our Vision

An empowered Kean faculty collaboratively developing their teaching skills and pedagogical values.

Three people standing in front of an expressive painting, smiling for the camera

Our Mission

To encourage and motivate all Kean employees toward deliberate, productive efforts to improve teaching within the constituencies we serve. To that end, the CTE connects all stakeholders in the Kean community with the tools and resources they need to grow and develop as educators. Our work balances external trends and identified best practices with local needs and interests while also balancing Kean’s role as New Jersey’s urban research university with our roots as a teaching college and normal school. The Center for Teaching Excellence strives to engage Kean’s faculty in a current, research-driven global discourse about teaching.

Our Values

The Center for Teaching Excellence at Kean University upholds these principles as central to our work:

Sustainability

We create resources, courses, connections, & communities built to last, and we minimize our unintended impact on our surroundings. This value calls us to:

minimize our use of physical resources
make content that can persist across platforms
emphasize resilience when introducing people to ideas or groups

Discoverability

Our efforts have effect only when they are used. The CTE at Kean works to ensure all members of Kean’s teaching community know how we can support their work. This value calls us to:

broadly publicize events and resources we create
support adjunct faculty development by accommodating scheduling and financial constraints
offer support and resources via multiple modalities

Community

Effective teaching extends outside the classroom into the society beyond. Similarly, the CTE links teachers and resources in ways that build ongoing human connection. This value calls us to:

design programming that encourages dialogue across academic silos
prioritize collaboration over content and engagement over solutionism
create spaces that welcome every Kean employee

What We Offer

Our small but mighty team provides recurring and on-demand training sessions, self-paced online courses, reference libraries, reading/affinity groups, and more! Plus, free coffee/tea and games to play or borrow. (Did we almost forget to mention the coffee and games?)

While we aim to support everyone teaching at Kean with all aspects of their classroom and online practice, we are especially focused on these areas right now: