CTE Strategies: Room for Improvement

Lindsay Wheeler, University of Virginia Center for Teaching Excellence

In the last two years our center has expanded from two faculty developers to five. We have also expanded our programming to reach more faculty and graduate students and continue to add new programming as we grow. Thus, we do not have a systematic approach to communicating our work to various stakeholders. Currently, this is our strategy:
1. To reach instructors to participate in our programs/workshops/events, we send emails out to targeted audiences. Sometimes we can get an email out to the entire faculty through the Provost's office. We hope to reach more faculty (and would like to find a better strategy for reaching underrepresented groups of instructors to support).
2. To share our work with other centers, we primarily present at conferences and publish in peer reviewed journals. We sometimes tweet, and our website is undergoing revisions to be more user-friendly. We do this to help our center be more well recognized and seen as a resource for our signature programs and assessments.
3. To share assessment/impact of our work with administrators at our university (e.g., department chairs, deans, provosts, board of visitors), we develop reports, 1-page documents, and ppt slides to show the impact of our work. We also have one-on-one meetings with these individuals to discuss what we are doing. This communication is intended to gain support for the CTE by having administrators advocate for us and bring us to the table for relevant discussions.

All of these communication strategies are done different, depending on the faculty developer in charge of the program/event. We would like to develop a streamlined and/or systematic process for communicating our work.