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School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning

Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning

The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), is a new 5-year, $10 million WCER project funded by the National Science Foundation.

CIRTL is a professional development program in teaching and learning that aims to prepare graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and current faculty, to meet the future challenges of national science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education.

CIRTL is directed by Robert Mathieu (UW Madison Professor of Astronomy), Andrew Porter, (Director, Wisconsin Center for Education Research), Terrence Millar (UW-Madison professor of mathematics and Associate Dean of the Physical Sciences, Graduate School), James Fairweather (Michigan State University), and Carol Colbeck (Pennsylvania State University).

CIRTL will advance the successful development of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty as educators by (a) transforming the conceptualization of the teaching process and (b) creating learning communities favorable toward that transformation. The new conceptualization of teaching is grounded in the idea of teaching as research. From this perspective, STEM educators will engage in their teaching in the same way they engage in their researchby hypothesizing, implementing, observing, analyzing, and improving.

The project will create graduate-through-faculty learning communities where growth in teaching skills occurs through collaborative relationships and activities and where the shared identity rests on values of learning, teaching, and professional development.

The long term goal of CIRTL is to develop a national STEM faculty with the knowledge, experience, and inclination to forge successful professional careers that include implementing and advancing effective teaching and learning practice for diverse audiences.

The five-year goals are CIRTL are to:

  1. create tools and strategies for preparing graduates-through-faculty to use and improve best practices in STEM teaching and learning;
  2. create graduate-through-faculty learning communities that promote, support and sustain improvement of teaching and learning practice;
  3. develop and implement strategies for transferring the CIRTL Professional Development Program in Teaching and Learning between research universities;
  4. produce cohorts of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers who are launching new faculty careers at diverse institutions, demonstrably succeeding in promising STEM learning for all; and
  5. become the center of a national conversation about professional development in STEM higher education teaching and learning.