Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning Mission Statement:
The primary aim of the Sherrerd Center for Teaching & Learning (SCTL) is to enable the academic success of all Smith students through faculty development efforts that support teaching and learning at the College.
Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning Goals:
Based on the understanding that teaching is always a work in progress and always improvable, the Sherrerd Center strives to
- Encourage continuous discourse among faculty about learning, addressing such questions as
- What do we know about how people learn?
- What are our learning goals for our students?
- How should students be engaged in order to take ownership of their own learning?
- Support new faculty as they develop into excellent teachers
- Support ongoing professional development for faculty
- Encourage faculty to share innovative teaching practices and strategies
- Build synergy between faculty development efforts and student academic support services (e.g., Jacobson Center, educational technology services, quantitative learning center, disability services and libraries)
- Enable the academic success of students from diverse backgrounds by promoting best practices for inclusive teaching, investigating achievement gaps in student learning and supporting strategies for overcoming such gaps
- Create a culture of purposeful inquiry among students
- Ensure that consideration of teaching and learning inform campus decision making
- Improve measures of teaching performance so they are useful to teachers and can serve as reasonable indicators for determining reappointment, tenure and promotion
- Support the scholarship of teaching and learning among faculty from diverse disciplines
