A Rally Call for Teaching Excellence Colleges and Universities: Your Role in the Movement

The purpose of this article is to galvanize institutions toward a movement to value teaching excellence in higher education. Colleges and universities that demonstrate this value are Teaching Excellence Colleges and Universities (TECUs), but they have never acted as a group. Many of these institutions lack power in the higher education landscape. However, as a collective, they have the opportunity to forge significant change in higher education. The College Educational Quality (CEQ) study was the first multiinstitutional, cross-disciplinary observational study of college teaching in the United States. CEQ revealed a great deal about college teaching excellence, the institutional contexts where teaching excellence manifests, and why. The CEQ study observed teaching in more than 700 courses across nine 4-year institutions of varying types (e.g., research, liberal arts, public, private, rural, urban, highly ranked, broad access). The CEQ study also surveyed faculty about their teaching practices as well as their institutional context for teaching (e.g., teaching development, culture, policies). Finally, CEQ surveyed students about their perceptions of the teaching in the courses. Across the 7 years of data collection, the author studied eight teaching frameworks that had been previously demonstrated to improve student learning. It is counterintuitive that high-prestige colleges and universities, some institutions that are purported to be higher quality, in fact have lower-quality teaching. Higher education should focus on education. Yet TECUs are often unseen -- hidden gems in a higher education landscape where a proportionally small number of institutions, those that largely do not focus on teaching, hold high-quality reputations, and receive a vast majority of the attention among scholars and funders.