Supporting Excellent Teaching Across the Faculty Career
The Center for Teaching Excellence serves faculty throughout their careers at Saint Anselm College.
Some of its work takes the form of workshops and events. Other work happens through mentoring relationships, faculty learning communities, consultations, fellowships, collaborative projects, and sustained initiatives addressing emerging needs in higher education.
Together, these activities create an institutional culture in which faculty development and excellent teaching remain continuing priorities.
Faculty Development
The CTE offers opportunities throughout the academic year for faculty to strengthen their teaching, encounter new ideas, and engage current questions in higher education.
Programs may include workshops, invited speakers, teaching conversations, consultations, and other opportunities focused on pedagogy, course design, assessment, student engagement, and emerging practices.
Rather than promoting a single model of excellent teaching, the CTE provides faculty with opportunities to consider evidence, exchange ideas, and make thoughtful choices appropriate to their disciplines, students, and courses.
Supporting New Faculty
Beginning a faculty career—or joining a new academic community—brings both opportunities and challenges.
The CTE helps new faculty become part of the teaching community at Saint Anselm College through orientation, mentoring, conversations about teaching, and opportunities to develop relationships with colleagues across the institution.
These programs help new colleagues learn about Saint Anselm's students, academic culture, and educational mission while also bringing their own experience and perspectives into the community.
Faculty Learning Communities
Some of the most valuable professional development happens when faculty have sustained opportunities to learn from one another.
The CTE supports faculty learning communities and other collaborative programs that bring colleagues together around shared questions about teaching and learning. These communities create space for interdisciplinary conversation, experimentation, reflection, and mutual support.
Faculty may explore a common book, pedagogical challenge, emerging technology, or other topic with implications for student learning.
Fellowships and Course Development
Through fellowships and special programs, the CTE provides faculty with additional time, resources, and support to reconsider aspects of their courses and teaching.
Among these opportunities is the Dr. Denise Askin Faculty Fellowship, administered through the CTE. Established in honor of Dr. Denise Askin, the fellowship supports faculty as they re-envision coursework and pedagogy with particular attention to creating learning environments in which students can flourish. [LINK: Learn more about the Dr. Denise Askin Faculty Fellowship]
The College publicly describes the fellowship as providing two to three faculty members annually with support, time, and resources for this work.
Teaching Innovation and Emerging Technologies
Higher education is changing rapidly.
New technologies, including generative artificial intelligence, raise important questions about teaching, learning, assessment, academic integrity, and the purposes of education itself.
The CTE helps faculty engage these developments thoughtfully rather than simply react to them. Through collaborative initiatives, consultations, faculty development, and opportunities for experimentation, the Center supports approaches that place educational purpose first.
At Saint Anselm, questions about innovation are also questions about mission: How can new tools serve genuine learning? What forms of human judgment, creativity, responsibility, and relationship should remain at the center of education? How should technological innovation be evaluated in light of the College's Catholic and Benedictine values?
The CTE creates spaces where faculty can explore these questions together.
Building a Community of Teaching and Learning
Teaching is deeply connected to disciplinary expertise, but it does not have to be solitary work.
One of the CTE's most important roles is creating opportunities for faculty from different disciplines and stages of their careers to encounter one another as teachers.
Through these conversations, faculty share practices, questions, successes, and challenges— and contribute to a broader culture of teaching excellence across Saint Anselm College.