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 Mission
To encourage and motivate all Kean employees toward deliberate, productive efforts to improve teaching within the constituencies we serve. To that end, the CTL 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, justice-oriented global discourse about teaching.
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:
- Community-Engaged Learning
- The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (commonly called “SoTL”)
- Active Learning
- Working and Teaching with AI
- General Education Reform
Laura Baecher
Associate Provost for Faculty Development
Chris Friend
Director, Center for Teaching Excellence / Assistant Professor of English
Melissa Libbey
Coordinator, Center for Teaching Excellence / Lecturer in English
