The role of Teaching Excellence at CTELT is to understand the culture of practice centered in students as learners and learning processes. It is important in this, to focus on the understanding of the pedagogies faculty choose for course curriculum, their various teaching roles and in a variety of scenes of instruction, ranging from the lecture course to the distance education course of the Virtual College.

As educators we must also reflect on learning by students, with their professors and faculty members’ reflecting on the teaching they are presenting to the students and their peers. Several main areas of reflection in this model are:

• learning as a process of knowledge construction, not absorption;
• learning as knowledge dependent, involving use of existing or prior knowledge to actively construct new knowledge;
  
• learning situated in a place and time (situated cognition);
• viewing professor teachers as lifelong learners who learn about teaching best from one another.

These theoretical ideas establish Teaching Excellence aims and allow for the practical application of what we know from these research literatures, as well as what we learn through self-application in our own communities of faculty and our own research in teaching.