The JSCC Center for Teaching & Learning

Written by the director and staff of the first, and one of the largest, teaching centers in American higher education – the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) – this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies for making a teaching center integral to an institution's educational mission.

Pasadena City College's Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) is an eight-year-old holistic approach to helping underprepared students to navigate through math, English, and other challenges of college. It is also attempting to revolutionize the way in which faculty look at their students and teach them. The approach adopted by the Center is catching on through California community colleges and across the United States, cross-fertilizing as it spreads. The Center's methods include the establishment of “learning communities” in which students take a series of linked courses together during their time on campus, and Math Jam, a two-week, noncredit summer program that introduces students to college math by making it fun.

Centers for teaching and learning are shifting away from introducing faculty members to technology and instead focusing on helping instructors improve their courses in a variety of ways.

In addition to addressing the history of and rationale for the teaching and learning center (TLC) as a means of achieving lasting professional development of the faculty, Schumann, Peters, and Olsen introduce the concept of cocreating value that not only facilitates the success of the TLC but also has the potential to permeate the educational fiber of the entire college or university.

Describes how the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, integrated its training efforts by creating a teaching and learning center. Development opportunities provided by the center for all employees; College's comprehensive professional development program as developed and implemented through its Teaching and Learning Center.

In this chapter, we describe strategies teaching and learning centers can use in partnering with programs to conduct action‐oriented assessment projects. We illustrate these strategies with examples from an evaluation of a social engagement requirement for art and design students.

This article is designed to encourage and offer suggestions to others who are thinking about creating a teaching center--while the original motivations, first steps, and early concerns and successes are still fresh in the memories of the center's architects.

The trend toward implementing models for Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) for academic support in higher education is gaining momentum. Whether due to external influences, such as the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which promotes inquiry about teaching and learning, or more related to internal forces such as the pressure to improve student retention, learning assistance administrators and teaching faculty increasingly share a common mission. The CTL movement assumes that significant learning takes place in multiple environments in and out of the classroom and that learning is a social interaction dependent on multi-layered and diverse learning communities. A case study at Randolph-Macon College suggests that moving learning centers toward the CTL model can effectively address some of the biggest challenges in the current postsecondary climate, such as retention, use of limited resources, and increased access.