CEE Mission and Strategic Goals

Mission

The mission of the Centre for Educational Excellence is to collaborate with instructors to inspire and support innovative, inclusive and reflective teaching approaches that create engaging learning experiences for students.

What We Do

• To achieve this mission, we facilitate workshops, provide individual consultations on course and curriculum design, and support online course design and development (including graphic design, video and audio production). We support the use of innovative educational technologies and create custom teaching development programs to meet the needs of departments and Faculties.
• Our programs are designed to engage instructors at all stages of their teaching careers, from teaching assistants and instructors new to teaching, to educational leaders who pursue teaching inquiry and serve as mentors to peers in their departments.
• We build capacity for innovative, student focused learning and teaching at SFU by leveraging the CEE team’s knowledge of
  • Research-informed teaching
  • Learning and curriculum design
  • Expertise in student focused assessment
  • Experience in facilitation
  • A deep understanding of diverse pedagogical approaches, from anti-racist pedagogy and inclusive teaching through teaching assistant development and technology enabled approaches learning.
• Teaching innovation happens in community, through exchange of ideas across disciplines, and through peer mentorship and conversation. Our programs are interactive, collaborative, and designed to create connections between instructors from diverse disciplines.  

Strategic Goals   

Our strategic goals are guided by SFU’s Academic Plan, the SFU Aboriginal Reconciliation Council’s Calls to Action, and by the evolving needs of instructors and students. In 2022-23, we work to:  

1. Develop systematic, developmentally sequenced teaching opportunities for SFU instructors across the career span, tailored to diverse disciplines and levels of experience, including training for teaching assistants.
2. Foster the development of inclusive teaching approaches that support diverse learners and pedagogies:
           
   a. Identify inclusive teaching tools and approaches that promote equity in the classroom and create the conditions that foster respectful exchange of ideas across all dimensions of difference.
   
   b. Create programming and resources that enable faculty to engage in decolonizing the curriculum of their courses in diverse disciplines.
   
   c. Enable instructors to support the learning of students who speak English as an additional language.
   
   
3. Create evidence-based faculty development programming to support SFU’s blended learning strategy.
4. Implement a new framework for supporting the development of faculty-led online and blended courses.
5. Support instructors and departments as they implement SFU’s teaching assessment framework (in collaboration with the AVPLT).
6. Provide accessible faculty development on all three SFU campuses through programming in diverse modalities to support SFU’s three-campus strategy.