Centers For Learning

Collected by the staff of the National College Learning Center Association, this vital collection of essays is designed to guide learning assistance professionals supporting student success initiatives in higher education.

This book presents innovative, engaging, and fun ideas to target the AASL National School Library Standards and content-area standards.

An illustrated guide for 32 different Early Childhood Learning Centers.

Everything you need to get started with learning centers: background, management tips, sample schedules, suggested topics, creative activities, and much more. With photos and classroom samples. For use with Grades K-4.

The how-tos of management, developmentally appropriate practices, room arrangements, assessment, record keeping and parent conference ideas. Also, centers on manipulatives, woodworking, books, blocks, language arts, dramatic arts and more!

"Universities are refocusing on pedagogy--how we teach and learn what we know--and they have placed that work in new centers for teaching and learning (CTL). In this book, the author maps the landscape of 1,200+ US centers and programs --including medical and professional school programs-- through another approach: coding of their websites. This data allows insight into CTL strategy and operations, and it offers a picture of a fuller near-population of centers (rather than a small sample of center directors)"--

Written by the director and staff of the first, and one of the largest, teaching centers in American higher education – the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) – this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies for making a teaching center integral to an institution’s educational mission. It presents a comprehensive vision for running a wide range of related programs, and provides faculty developers elsewhere with ideas and material to prompt reflection on the management and practices of their centers – whatever their size – and on how best to create a culture of teaching on their campuses. Given that only about a fifth of all U.S. postsecondary institutions have a teaching center, this book also offers a wealth of ideas and models for those administrators who are considering the development of new centers on their campuses.Topics covered include:• The role of the director, budgetary strategies, and operational principles• Strategies for using evaluation to enhance and grow a teaching center• Relationships with center constituencies: faculty, provost, deans, and department chairs• Engagement with curricular reform and assessment• Strengthening diversity through faculty development• Engaging faculty in effective use of instructional technology• Using student feedback for instructional improvement• Using action research to improve teaching and learning• Incorporating role play and theatre in faculty development• Developing graduate students as consultants• Preparing future faculty for teaching• The challenges of faculty development at a research universityIn the concluding chapter, to provide additional context about the issues that teaching centers face today, twenty experienced center directors who operate in similar environments share their main challenges, and the strategies they have developed to overcome them through innovative programming and careful management of their resources. Their contributions fall into four broad categories: institutional-level challenges, engaging faculty and students and supporting engaged pedagogy, discipline-specific programming, and programming to address specific instructor career stages.

Writing Centers and Learning Commons presents program administrators, directors, staff, and tutors with theoretical rationales, experiential journeys, and go-to practical designs and strategies for the many questions involved when writing centers find themselves operating in shared environments. The chapters comprehensively examine the ways writing centers make the most of sharing common ground. Directors, coordinators, administrators, and stakeholders draw on past and present attention to writing center studies to help shape the future of the learning commons and narrate their substantial collective experience with collaborative efforts to stay centered while empowering colleagues and student writers at their institutions. The contributors explore what is gained and lost by affiliating writing centers with learning commons, how to create sound pedagogical foundations that include writing center philosophies, how writing center practices evolved or have been altered by learning center affiliations, and more. Writing Centers and Learning Commons is for all stakeholders of writing in and across campuses collaborating on (by choice or edict), or wishing to explore the possibilities of, a learning commons enterprise. Contributors: Alice Batt, Cassandra Book, Charles A. Braman, Elizabeth Busekrus Blackmon, Virginia Crank, Celeste Del Russo, Patricia Egbert, Christopher Giroux, Alexis Hart, Suzanne Julian, Kristen Miller, Robby Nadler, Michele Ostrow, Helen Raica-Klotz, Kathleen Richards, Robyn Rohde, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, David Stock