Development of an Institutional Teaching Model

Many universities host centers for learning and teaching that disseminate pedagogical best practices, to benefit their faculty and, ultimately, their students. However, many smaller colleges and universities without such centers struggle to provide pedagogical development for their faculty due to a lack of knowledge about best practices or the centralized guidance and staff a center can provide. A small public polytechnic university took a grass roots approach to this problem. We first established a teaching workshop based on the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) model to promote teaching best practices. Then, we developed an institutional teaching model to guide further faculty professional development activities and to define effective teaching so it can be assessed uniformly for all faculty at the university. The primary goals of this paper are to describe the process of developing the institutional teaching model, illustrate its use in promoting and assessing effective teaching across a variety of academic disciplines, and discuss its effectiveness for assessing both classroom and remotely delivered instruction.