CASTL Institutional Leadership Program

The CASTL Institutional Leadership Program builds on the influential work undertaken by colleges and universities, campus centers and educational organizations, scholarly and professional societies, and CASTL Campus Program Leadership Clusters, to facilitate collaboration among institutions with demonstrated commitment to and capacity for action, inquiry and innovation in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Participating institutions are organized to address specific themes important to the improvement of student learning, as well as the development and sustainability of a scholarship of teaching and learning. For more information, click here to visit the Carnegie Foundation's website.

CUNY’s Leadership Cluster: “Building SoTL System-wide”

The multi-campus institutions in this cluster have developed an Action Plan, detailing their system-wide strategies for improving undergraduate education through a focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Below is the Action Plan from CUNY.

Gen Ed II: Focus on Teaching and Learning
Carnegie at CUNY
Action Plan, December 2006

The CUNY-Carnegie Project brings together people, projects, and research from across the University to strengthen undergraduate education. Carnegie at CUNY foregrounds the idea of researchable questions meant to stimulate the promotion, improvement, and evaluation of learning and teaching. We take as our focus the largest common ground on which we stand: the courses, curriculum, and practices that constitute general education at CUNY. Our system-wide work will be multi-pronged, led by administrators and faculty from across the University in a distributed leadership structure, and building upon existing networks in the CUE, WAC/WID, and Gen Ed projects, and the Teaching and Learning Centers.

Our goals are to:

1) Promote explicit connections among teaching, scholarship, and research.

• Establish a Provosts’ Advisory Council to identify ways to recognize and reward effective teaching and enact necessary policy changes, in alignment with the Campaign for Student Success

• Bring together faculty and administrators through CUE, Gen Ed, WAC/WID, Teaching and Learning Centers, and the Provosts’ Advisory Council

• Establish a CUNY-Carnegie Faculty Fellows program

2) Create a University-wide center to support the study of learning and teaching.

• Support faculty study of the ways in which students learn, through faculty development grants, research, and other initiatives; house and disseminate materials for the development of teaching and research about learning

• Connect local centers for teaching and learning

• Showcase learning and teaching projects from across the campuses in public forums

3) Advance the study of learning and teaching within and across the disciplines.

• Promote and publish disciplinary innovations in teaching

• Foster cross-campus, discipline-specific teaching and research groups for full- and part-time faculty and doctoral candidates

4) Enhance Gen Ed reform with a focus on learning and teaching, involving full- and part-time faculty.

• Build on continuing efforts in CUE to connect the pieces of the undergraduate experience

• Strengthen teaching and learning in the first-year experience and learning communities

• Promote cross-campus coordination of transfer and articulation

• Foster links between immersion, remedial education, and general education coursework

• Promote an understanding and the development of student literacy

• Examine the place of new technologies in teaching reading, writing, math and ESL

Carnegie Projects at CUNY

• Provosts’ Advisory Council: Peter Katopes and Vita Rabinowitz
• General Education: Bob Whittaker
• Teaching and Learning Centers: Eva Fernandez and Janine Graziano-King
  
• CASTL Study Group: Cheryl Smith, Erin Martineau, Peter Gray, Jason Toougaw and Bob Whittaker
• Transfer and Articulation: Loretta DiLorenzo
• CASTL Digitial Commons: Erin Martineau and Bob Whittaker