Our mission, vision, and values
Our mission is to collaborate with individuals, academic departments, and academic support units to foster capacity and community around teaching and to promote an institutional culture that values effective teaching and meaningful learning.
Our vision is to inspire teaching excellence, innovation, and inquiry.
Our values are what ground us; they are the foundation on which our work is built. At CTE, we value being:
- Supportive. We show care and respect to our colleagues and ourselves while also asking questions to help encourage growth and change
- Creative. We develop ideas for the future, adapt evidence-based practices to fit evolving contexts, and foster the courage needed for risk-taking.
- Invested. We take pride in our work, bringing our best every time, and show a clear commitment to our mandate, vision, and mission.
Learn about what drives our work and read about our latest activities and initiatives in our Strategic Plan, our latest Annual Report (PDF), and our monthly newsletter:
Fostering teaching excellence
Instructors across all ranks, from teaching assistants and postdoctoral fellows to new professors and senior leaders, attend our workshops and intensive programming. (170 workshops and events in 2020-2021).
Faculty also seek consultations on course design and delivery for both face-to-face and blended learning courses. (4841 consulations with 1313 instructors in 2020-2021).
We work extensively with departments and faculties on curriculum renewal and program design. (109 curriculum events and consultations in 38 departments in 2020-2021)
Finally, with more than 2,500 course offerings annually in Waterloo LEARN, we support the use of this learning management system.
Find out more about how you can work with us. Read more about our:
- Events
- Instructional, curriculum, and research support: we can support you with curriculum design and renewal, integrative learning, educational research, teaching awards, teaching with technology, and writing across the curriculum
- New faculty programming
- Graduate-student programs
- Postdoctoral-fellow programming
- Resources: popular online resources including over 150 Teaching Tips on practical topics, Teaching Stories featuring exceptional University of Waterloo instructors, our Teaching and Learning Research Guide, and more.
Supporting innovation
CTE also supports innovation in teaching and learning at Waterloo. We investigate emerging technologies and share our recommendations with our university community and beyond through workshops and online resources. We encourage alternative ways of assessing student learning, such as the use of e-portfolios. Finally, the Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Grant program, which is administered by CTE and funded by the office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic, supports projects investigating innovative approaches to enhancing teaching and fostering deep student learning at Waterloo.
Cultivating inquiry
We offer a range of services to help instructors systematically explore the theory and practice of teaching and learning:
- We run learning communities that bring together instructors to learn from one another and higher education research.
- The Certificate of University Teaching program gives graduate students the opportunity to investigate the scholarship of teaching and learning.
- The Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Grant program funds projects exploring the effectiveness of a teaching strategy, assessment, or learning process.
- Our annual University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference provides campus community members a venue for sharing exemplary teaching practices and pedagogical research.
We can support you as you develop, implement, and disseminate your educational research: learn more by visiting Research and Grants.
Our staff are also active educational researchers. Read about our latest staff research and service activities.