Roy R. Charles Center
University Teaching Project
The strategies and techniques that promote learning in students also promote learning in faculty: that is the proposition that underlies the University Teaching Project at the College of William and Mary. If student learning is to become more active, more critical and synthetic, and more cooperative, then faculty need a dynamic teaching development program that has these same qualities.
The William and Mary faculty has made a concerted effort over the past ten years to rethink and renew the undergraduate program in such a way as to help students move from being passive consumers of knowledge to being active creators of knowledge. We have made progress toward achieving this goal by dramatically expanding our undergraduate research program (which now funds over 350 student projects each Summer), and by instituting a completely new curriculum that includes required freshman seminars and upper-division small class experiences.
But until the University Teaching Project was instituted in 1994 we lacked a faculty development program that could help faculty expand their teaching methods to include techniques that are more in line with our new goals for student learning. Many teaching programs at other schools follow what might be called the "expert model," where purported pedagogical specialists dispense their wisdom to a passive audience of faculty. Our Teaching Project follows what we call the "collegial model," where faculty learn from each other's insights and experience in the classroom, often working in the same kind of flexible small-group settings that foster student learning. In short, the University Teaching Project models good teaching practices at the same time that it institutionalizes a dialogue on good teaching practices across campus.
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