Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT)
Teaching Minds, Touching Hearts
“You can perform miracles by touching the hearts of those entrusted to your care.”
– Saint John Baptiste de La Salle, Meditation 180.3
Mission and Vision
The Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching promotes academic excellence by awakening, nurturing, and empowering the university community to be effective, transformative, and holistic educators who ensure quality student learning across all academic offerings at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.
Values and Outcomes
CELT is animated by the deeply held Saint Mary’s value that education has the capability to transform lives, evangelize, and be the conduit for one’s vocation/calling in life.
Saint Mary’s community members who participate in development opportunities organized by CELT will be able to:
- Promote human flourishing and dignity through integrating character education, virtue formation, and mature technology-adoption within their classrooms, units, and programs
- Apply the practical wisdom of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Lasallian charism that proceeds from it to pressing concerns for higher education and our shared communities
- Embrace and develop innovative educational practices following emerging scholarship of teaching and learning
- Create whole-person learning environments in which students can develop and reach formation goals in the context of their unique vocations
- Confidently respond to different learning and leadership contexts with their own educational artistry informed by innovative and effective educational practices
Upcoming Events
All events are free and are designed to bring faculty and staff across campuses together to grow in community as Lasallian educators.
Public Webinar Series on Character Education and AI
In his recent encyclical, the late Pope Francis characterized our times as an “age of superficiality” in which we are all “rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers . . . unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives.” Lasallian education, with its attention to the practical needs of learners within the context of forming whole persons as a leaders prepared for ethical lives of service, offers a meaningful response to emerging technologies by enabling students to withstand the “age of superficiality” and order tools to the dignity of the human person.
Join the Character Education in the Age of Automation series for webinars that approach emerging technology from the insights of whole-person education. This series, part of the Center’s Empowering Ethical Leaders Initiative, promotes human flourishing and dignity through integrating character education and mature technology-adoption in the classroom.
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Teaching Innovation
We support faculty in developing innovative, relationship-rich Lasallian teaching practices.
Instructional Technology
InTech helps you make excellent use of technology in service of teaching and learning
FLGs
Our Faculty Learning Groups are groups of Saint Mary’s people exploring topics in teaching and learning.
Teaching Support
We offer coaching, collaboration, and consultations on course design, instruction and environment issues, assessment, and can even observe your course (online or face-to-face).
Trainings and Workshops
We offer trainings and workshops in technology, course design, and new developments in teaching and learning.
CELT Initiatives
Empowering Ethical Leaders
Following the university’s distinctive Lasallian charism, which views education as an expression of Christian humanism that is fundamentally transformational, evangelical, and focused on the dignity of the poor, CELT supports the university’s mission to promote human flourishing through forming ethical leaders through various partnerships.
Effective and Excellent Education
CELT informs and supports the “educational artistry” of faculty through programming and training opportunities steeped in innovative and effective practices in course design, community building, technology integration, and relational teaching across modalities.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
So that faculty may be energized to apply research to their own teaching and develop their own SoTL projects, CELT offers research-sharing discussions, facilitates connections with journals and conferences, and provides material support for attending the annual Grading Conference.
Events, Webinars, and Workshops
Our Mission
Enriched by the Lasallian Catholic heritage, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota awakens, nurtures, and empowers learners to ethical lives of service and leadership.