ABOUT UCAT
Mission | History | Philosophy | National Service and Involvement
MISSION
University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT) exists to assist all those who teach at The Ohio State University to excel in teaching, support student learning, and experience the satisfaction that results from teaching well.
UCAT seeks to advance teaching at Ohio State by promoting a university culture that puts students first by valuing a scholarly approach to teaching and learning, and focuses on faculty success by providing information, consultation, and events on teaching.
HISTORY
UCAT can trace its roots to the Instructional Development and Evaluation unit of the Office of Learning Resources, which was created in 1980 to add instructional consultation services to a media services unit. In 1987, the unit became Faculty & TA Development in the Center for Teaching Excellence, a move designed to highlight the teaching emphasis of the mission. Since that time, the unit has retained the same name, although the parent organization became the Center for Instructional Resources in 1993 and part of 1994, when it reported to Academic Technology Services. In 1994, the unit was separated from media and computing services and assumed a dual reporting line to the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) and the College of Education.
In 2000, the unit began a revision of its services. This resulted in a refocusing of efforts to better address priorities for course redesign, learning outcomes assessments, and technology–enhanced teaching, learning, and research. Most of these changes move toward longer–term professional development for Ohio State faculty, staff, and GTAs, as well as significant new service areas––including greater support to academic units on teaching–related issues, such as GTA support, peer review of teaching, and curriculum development and assessment, along with the promotion of and assistance with the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Reporting lines were streamlined in 2005; the unit now reports only to the OAA. Since that time, the unit has aligned its focus with that of OAA, to "stimulate and enable academic excellence". UCAT's philosophy of practice explicates the unit's mission, vision, objectives, and core principles.
As the unit continued to expand and develop, it was found that the name, Faculty & TA Development, expressed neither the range of services nor the mission, vision, objectives, and core principles of the unit. In addition to providing support to individuals, our unit offers programs, communities, departmental partnerships, and interdisciplinary collaborations.
Thus, in 2009, the unit was renamed as the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching.
PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy of Practice
The support and services we provide are guided by the following core principles:
Community
We believe that knowledge and expertise are socially constructed within a specific context and that a collaborative community provides the space for people to share ideas and learn from one another. We focus on creating and sustaining a climate that supports teaching, developing a community of peers at the local, national, and international levels, and fostering a culture that celebrates the practice of teaching, as well as research on university instruction. We also value and seek to extend our partnerships within Ohio State, across the field of higher education, and more broadly.
Community requires trust and a sense of safety. Our goal is to provide a safe and trustworthy environment for those instructors who choose to work with us. One part of this effort is that we work with them on a voluntary and confidential basis, and that we do not participate in summative evaluation of their work. We believe that we are more effective as helpers when we are not also the "judges."
Our community is stronger for valuing the diversity of its members. The University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT) has a long-standing collaboration with the Office of Minority Affairs to support improving the learning climate for students from historically under-represented groups. The Commitment to Success Program uses the methodologies of scholarly analysis to support academic units in developing and implementing diversity action plans. Recently, this effort has expanded in partnership with the Department of Theatre, creating an interactive theatre troupe, InterACT, which provides highly effective programming on issues of diversity and inclusion. Other partners in these efforts include Student Affairs, the ADA coordinator, the Office for Disability Services, and the Nisonger Center.
We have worked to create opportunities for faculty to engage in learning communities through the Ohio State Teaching Enhancement Program (OSTEP). These groups meet regularly for a year, working together to support each other's efforts on a teaching related project. Similarly, UCAT Development supports other communities of teacher -scholars, such as the Academy of Teaching and TOAST - The OSU Association for Scholarship of Teaching. UCAT also sponsors book groups, both campus wide and within academic units, as a form of multi-level community; participants share the experience of reading a book together and trying the ideas they read about.
Through surveys and reports from these groups, we know that members value the community created throughout the life of the groups and beyond. They feel a better sense of connectedness with other units on campus and see common challenges and solutions.
We also have a strong commitment to enhancing and utilizing the community that exists within our office. We believe in working together in a reflective manner that enables us to develop ourselves as members of our office, our university, and our profession.
Service
We believe our role is to make other people's work lives easier, more productive, and more enjoyable. We work with a 'person-first' orientation that begins with the needs of the client. It is important to consider each person as a multifaceted being in order to serve him/her best. We work to increase student success by supporting individual instructors and entire units, and we also participate in service to the university.
It is vital that the staff of a university teaching center address the particular needs of the instructors with whom they are working, just as all teachers must address the particular needs of the students who are actually in their classes. At The University Center for the Advancement of Teaching, we listen carefully to faculty and teaching associates to be sure we are responding to their real needs. We also make a point of trying always to say "yes" to whatever request an instructor has: sometimes that means "yes, we can do that for or with you," sometimes, "yes, we can direct you to the place on campus that provides that service," and sometimes, "yes, we'll help you find the information or resources you want." If faculty members have to spend too much time and effort finding the support they need, they may decide not to follow through with whatever instructional innovation they had in mind. This makes a service orientation, the "yes we can" attitude, very important for the success of both individual instructional consultants and for the entire teaching center as an organization.
In serving on academic department and college committees and university initiatives, UCAT seeks to be both a source of information and expertise and an advocate for enhancing a university culture that supports and honors teaching and teaching improvement. We have been invited to participate in many such activities including the Senate Committee on Peer Review of Teaching, SEI Oversight, Assessment of GEC, and several college and departmental efforts to improve teaching and to develop systems of assessment.
UCAT makes a concerted, regular effort to gather and use feedback from our clients and constituents. Satisfaction surveys after events, annual surveys that include both quantitative and qualitative responses, the numbers of return users of our services, events attendance, email and comments (solicited and not), and grants awarded all afford evidence of the effectiveness of our work. These data also allow us to continue to improve the service we give.
Scholarship
As members of the academic community, the staff of UCAT understands that scholarship is the core value and practice of our institution. We believe that this culture of evidence should guide teaching and service, just as it does discovery-focused research. Scholarship is demonstrated in critically reflective, scholarly teaching and assessment.
We have published regularly in the national-level journals of the field of educational development, and continue to have an active research agenda exploring both university teaching and efforts to enhance and support such teaching. We also follow, use, and share the literature on university pedagogy with Ohio State instructors to help them to be scholarly teachers, for whom research on teaching informs their practice and for whom research on teaching is as creative an act as any other form of original act of the scholarship of discovery or creation, disseminated like any other scholarly endeavor performed by us and our colleagues at our institution.
We help in clarifying their instructional goals, generating testable questions about how best to achieve these goals, and gathering useful data to answer their questions. These efforts are often limited to a single instructor and a single class. However, this practice often generates findings that can and should be shared.
This practice has been growing internationally in higher education over the last fifteen or so years under the name of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). UCAT has championed in these efforts at Ohio State. In addition to assisting individual faculty members in their SoTL efforts, UCAT sponsored a faculty learning community on the topic that has grown into TOAST - The OSU Association for Scholarship of Teaching. Affiliated with local, national and international partners, this group of more than 30 Ohio State faculty supports its members in collegial relationships across disciplines and seeks to reinforce a faculty culture that brings the scholarship of teaching and research together.
By working in community, with the orientation of service, and techniques of scholarship, The University Center for the Advancement of Teaching seeks to further our mission of supporting the enhancement/advancement of teaching and learning at The Ohio State University.
NATIONAL SERVICE AND INVOLVEMENT
UCAT staff consult with other institutions on college teaching and learning and on faculty development. They present at conferences on these topics and are involved in professional associations that deal with college teaching and faculty development, such as the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, the American Association for Higher Education and Accreditation, and the International Alliance of Teacher Scholars.
UCAT has been involved in several national projects on the improvement of college teaching, such as the Preparing Future Faculty Project and the National Consortium to Prepare Graduate Students as College Teachers, and both the Research University Consortium for the Advancement of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Scholarship of Multicultural Teaching and Learning clusters of the AAHE/Carnegie Campus Program.