The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) provides comprehensive services supporting excellent teaching and learning at Indiana University Bloomington. A partnership between the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and University Information Technology Services, the CITL provides leadership and expertise to enable innovation in curricula, implementation of powerful technologies and pedagogies in and beyond the classroom, and student engagement with learning resources and materials to promote critical analytic and research skills. The CITL’s comprehensive approach comes through its unique fusion of programs and personnel, providing services in instructional and curricular consulting, instructional technologies, service-learning, writing instruction, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
A key component of the CITL’s work is its focus on evidence of student learning, particularly the use of evidence as formative feedback for faculty members and academic programs. One of its most significant current projects is a programmatic review initiative for IUB’s College of Arts and Sciences, which involves the identification of program goals and learning outcomes for each undergraduate major, as well as the assessment of those outcomes as a means of informing faculty decisions about courses and curricula. This focus on evidence of student learning permeates the CITL’s other work as well, including its use of a backwards course design model, its variety of to its strong integration of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
As just one example of programming, the center has developed a program of Faculty Learning Communities (FLC). FLC’s are cohorts of faculty members, often from different disciplines or fields of study, who ask questions about teaching and learning, try out teaching innovations, assess student learning, create new models of practice, and publish scholarship about their work. Each FLC shares a question, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, as members deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. Similar to the Communities of Inquiry that are at the core of the CITL’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Program, FLCs work on an inquiry project to produce outcomes or products about teaching and learning. Faculty in such communities engage in scholarly teaching and student-centered learning, collaborating within a collegial framework that offers peer review and support.