Teaching Excellence in Action
The work of the Center for Teaching Excellence evolves as the needs of faculty, students, and higher education change.
Each year, the CTE combines ongoing faculty-development programs with focused initiatives addressing significant opportunities and challenges in teaching and learning.
The projects featured here offer a glimpse of that work.
Faculty Learning and Development
Throughout the academic year, the CTE brings faculty together for workshops, conversations, learning communities, and other professional-development opportunities.
Programs address topics ranging from course design and student engagement to assessment, inclusive teaching practices, emerging technologies, and the changing needs of today's college students.
The goal is not simply to provide occasional events, but to foster an ongoing culture of reflection and growth around teaching at Saint Anselm.
New Faculty Mentoring
The transition to a new academic institution is an important stage in a faculty member's professional life.
The CTE supports new faculty through a mentoring program that provides opportunities for conversation, guidance, and connection with experienced Saint Anselm colleagues.
Mentoring complements other new-faculty programming by helping colleagues become part of the intellectual and teaching community of the College while developing their own identities as Anselmian educators.
Dr. Denise Askin Faculty Fellowship
The Dr. Denise Askin Faculty Fellowship honors a distinguished Saint Anselm educator and leader whose work left a lasting mark on the College.
Administered through the Center for Teaching Excellence, the fellowship provides selected faculty members with time, support, and resources to rethink aspects of their courses and pedagogy.
The fellowship reflects an important principle of the CTE's work: meaningful innovation in teaching requires more than good ideas. Faculty also need opportunities to explore those ideas carefully, develop them intentionally, and assess their impact on student learning.
Exploring Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching
The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape in which colleges and universities teach, learn, and assess student work.
At Saint Anselm College, the CTE is helping faculty approach this transformation thoughtfully and intentionally.
In collaboration with colleagues across the College, the Center is supporting faculty exploration of AI-enhanced teaching through structured pilot programs. Participating faculty examine the pedagogical possibilities and limitations of emerging technologies, redesign selected assignments or learning experiences, and consider how AI affects questions of learning, assessment, academic integrity, and human formation.
Particular attention is given to the ethical dimensions of these technologies and to their relationship with the Catholic and Benedictine educational values that shape Saint Anselm College.
The aim is not the adoption of technology for its own sake. It is to help faculty make informed decisions about whether, when, and how technology can serve meaningful learning.
Faculty Learning Communities
Faculty learning communities provide sustained opportunities for colleagues to explore important questions together over time.
Organized around selected themes, books, or pedagogical challenges, these communities encourage interdisciplinary conversation and allow faculty members to learn from perspectives beyond their own fields.
They also embody one of the central commitments of the CTE: faculty development is strongest when educators are not simply recipients of information but participants in a community of inquiry.
Inviting New Perspectives to Campus
The CTE periodically brings scholars, educators, and other experts to Saint Anselm to engage faculty in conversations about teaching and higher education.
These visits introduce new perspectives to campus while providing opportunities for faculty to consider emerging questions alongside colleagues.
Recent and upcoming programming has addressed topics such as teaching innovation, artificial intelligence, course design, student learning, and the relationship between technological change and the human purposes of education.
Looking Ahead
Teaching excellence is never a finished project.
Students change. Disciplines develop. New technologies emerge. Faculty encounter new questions. The educational landscape evolves.
The role of the Center for Teaching Excellence is therefore both enduring and dynamic: to provide the community, resources, opportunities, and intellectual space that allow Saint Anselm faculty to continue growing as teachers.
In doing so, the CTE helps ensure that innovation at Saint Anselm remains grounded in something deeper than novelty—a sustained commitment to excellent teaching, meaningful learning, and the formation of students.