When talking with UVA alumni, Michael Palmer often hears about one or two professors who encouraged, challenged, and allowed them to flourish. “The question that goes through my mind,” he said, “is why only one or two? Wouldn’t it be cool if every alum could name eight or 10 professors who had a profound impact on them?”

Palmer is a professor and the Barbara J. Fried Director of UVA’s Center for Teaching Excellence, which was founded in 1990 and is dedicated to creating—in Palmer’s words—the conditions that allow all instructors to thrive in the classroom and thus allow all students to thrive academically. This is the vision that drives the center’s work.

“Faculty typically aren’t taught how to teach,” explained Palmer, “and so they don’t know how to
design classes, create effective assessments, and create active, engaged learning environments. Teaching is a learned skill, even if you have innate talent, and it takes a long time to figure those things out on your own.”

Palmer knows this from experience. His transition from being a chemistry scholar to leading the center was a direct result of examining his own students’ learning and asking questions about his teaching practices. This led him to research in educational development by scholars like Lendol Calder, a history professor and author who argued for a fundamental reimagining of survey courses, pointing out with linguistic flair that the traditional focus on “covering” material was essentially wrongheaded—after all, the word “cover” can also mean “conceal.” Instead, Calder argued, “uncovering” history should be the aim: creating classroom environments where critical inquiry about the material leads to deeper understanding.

This resonated with Palmer’s experience. He recalled giving an assignment near the end of a calculus course that prompted students to articulate the concepts covered during the semester. The results were illuminating: “Even though they did fine on the assessments, it was clear they hadn’t put all the pieces together.”

Palmer joined the CTE in 2003 and has been at the helm for a decade. His position was endowed in 2018 with a $3 million gift from former Board of Visitors member Barbara J. Fried. Matched in part by the Bicentennial Professors Fund and with additional support from the Office of the President, the resulting $6 million investment recognizes the importance of teaching excellence across the University.

“There are many wonderful and incredible aspects of the University,” Fried said at the time. “But when it comes down to it, what do we do? We teach. Research is an important part, of course. But without students, there wouldn’t be any reason to exist. Without great faculty, you are not going to reach the students.”

Under Palmer’s leadership and with the support of the endowment, the center doubled in size and its budget tripled, expanding the number of instructors it reaches to over 1,000 annually while also focusing on organizational development: examining what teaching excellence looks like across the University and helping it become a better place to learn. To do this, the center draws on a scholarship in a dozen or more areas, including cognitive science, neuroscience, educational psychology, education, and the practitioner-based field known as the scholarship of teaching and learning. Together, these inform the field of educational development.

“TEACHING REALLY MATTERS HERE”

The Center for Teaching Excellence guides instructors through research-based approaches to studying and improving their classrooms, from workshops and funding opportunities that support pedagogical innovation to web resources, book groups, and learning communities. Its signature programs are the Course Design Institute, a five-day iterative, dynamic, and scholarly program of learning-focused course design, and its online counterpart, C3Design. The two have helped over 1,500 instructors design effective and engaging courses.

An echo of Calder’s call to “uncover” the subject can be heard in faculty descriptions of the Course Design Institute experience: “CDI’s philosophy is teaching, not just content delivery.”

Andrew Pennock, an associate professor at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, has been working with the CTE throughout his 11 years at UVA and sees it as a signal that “teaching really matters here.” He recommends the Course Design Institute to any faculty joining the school.

“You’re going to do the work of designing your class anyway,” he said, “so doing it in a community and using research-based frameworks to evaluate what you’re planning, and making those plans robust, is just better than trying to reinvent the wheel.”

One of the most recent recipients of the University Teaching Award, given to faculty members who distinguish themselves both in the classroom and in their fields, Pennock prioritizes experiential learning in his courses, getting students out of the classroom and working with real-world clients.

“These instructional strategies motivate students to learn,” Pennock said. “Reading the manual for running a nuclear reactor is probably the most boring thing in the world. Unless you’re inside a nuclear reactor, and then it’s the most riveting thing you’ve ever read. If you can have students see the experiential value of the classroom work that they’re doing, then students are self-motivated to do the work.”

RESEARCH, RECOGNITION, AND RESOURCES

The CTE team members’ own experiences in the classroom and the research that emerges from them are key aspects of the center’s success and sets it apart from its institutional peers, nationally and internationally, whose staff often don’t teach or do research. During Palmer’s tenure as director, the CTE team has published nearly 50 peer-reviewed articles, co-authored books, and presented close to 100 conference sessions. They have been invited to share their expertise both nationally and internationally and earned seven prestigious educational development awards.

The CTE’s programming, too, has had impressive recognition. The C3Design program, which allowed UVA to support the unexpected and abrupt pivot to online teaching when the pandemic struck in 2020, won an Innovation Award from the Professional Organizational Development Network, as did the center’s unique web resource, Teaching Hub. While most centers for teaching and learning have a website, they become outdated very quickly; UVA’s Teaching Hub, on the other hand, is a collection of teaching resources with close to 30,000 visitors accessing its deep well of expert knowledge
each year.

This is just one more way Fried’s endowment has created opportunities for the center to succeed—and to pay it forward: “Because we have resources,” Palmer said, “we’re always thinking about things we can do that the larger community can benefit from. The Teaching Hub is for us to help our instructors, but it’s also for the world.”

The outward focus is part of what draws others in.

“In this role, almost everything I do has an element of teaching,” Palmer said of the impact of Fried’s visionary gift. “It’s not just my students that I’m teaching, but it’s the faculty I work with. And then their students. It’s administrators who then—as they learn about teaching—spread that to the departments. And so there’s this butterfly effect: hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of people can be positively impacted. That feels good.”