In the recent past, higher education did not commonly address pedagogical practices of college faculty (Boyer 1990). Universities assumed that faculty members could effectively teach in their area of expertise and that knowledge of a subject matter would translate into good teaching. However, scholars of teaching and learning began to emphasize the need to identify best practices. When presenting best practices at national and international conferences focused on pedagogy, many administrators and instructors in higher education took notice (Hutchings, Huber, and Ciccone 2011). In response, during the last three decades, centers for teaching and learning appeared across the country. These centers, with names such as "center for teaching excellence," "teaching enhancement center," or "the center for teaching and learning," all focus on the same goal: train faculty to be more effective teachers, and in turn improve student learning. Through these centers faculty members:• obtain peer-review assessments, • learn how to align classroom goals with course assessments, • partner with a mentor or more senior faculty member on campus for continued guidance on their teaching, • obtain training on how to teach online and other nontraditional contexts, and • discuss specific challenges they face in the classroom.In addition to serving as catalysts for best practices in teaching, centers ideally promote a more scholarly approach to teaching, one that encourages faculty to use the methodology most appropriate for their disciplines to promote student learning. A campus teaching and learning center is a key tool in communicating and promoting the use of SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching NEW DIRECTIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING, no. 136, Winter 2013
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.