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

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.

Offerings: Hendrickson Forum Book Discussion, Manager Onboarding and Employee Orientation, The Twelve Virtues for a Good Teacher, Character Education in the Age of Automation

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.

Offerings: New Faculty Orientation and Program Director Training, Course Enhancement Institute,  Online Instructor Certification, Teaching Fellows Program, Regular and Substantive Interaction Training

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.

Offerings: Faculty Conferences, SoTL Showcase, Faculty Learning Groups, Summer Teaching and Learning Series