The mission of the Center for Teaching Excellence is to foster the enhancement of teaching excellence in all its forms. We seek to provide constructive and developmental mechanisms for nurturing the excellence in teaching which already exists at IUP. These mechanisms will honor our differences and build on our strengths. We attempt to:
- expedite the achievement of the goals and missions of IUP, its faculty, and its students as they relate to teaching;
- facilitate the professional and personal development of faculty members through teaching excellence activities;
- define and provide mechanisms for enhancing and recognizing excellent teaching;
- stimulate thinking, discussion, and research on teaching excellence;
- provide forums for the exchange of information and ideas about teaching excellence.
In the end, inspired teaching keeps the flame of scholarship alive. Almost all successful academics give credit to creative teachers—those mentors who defined their work so compellingly that it became, for them, a lifetime challenge. Without the teaching function, the continuity of knowledge will be broken and the store of human knowledge dangerously diminished.
—Dr. Ernest L. Boyer, author of Scholarship Reconsidered