McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning
From QED
The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University views teaching and learning as processes of inquiry. For teachers, that inquiry entails reflecting on what they want students to learn and deciding how to advance and assess that learning. For students, that inquiry involves the self-conscious questioning and awareness of their approaches to learning. Thus effective teaching and successful learning depend on an understanding of the research on human learning. In our consultations, programs, and publications, we translate that research into meaningful ideas for practice for both teachers and students.
We support faculty members and instructors as they advance as teachers, graduate students as they begin their teaching practice and progress as teachers and professionals, and undergraduates as they develop as learners and scholars.
The McGraw Center serves three constituencies at Princeton:
- Faculty
- Graduate Students
- Undergraduates
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McGraw Center Mission Statement
The McGraw Center views teaching and learning as processes of inquiry. For teachers, that inquiry entails reflecting on what they want students to learn and deciding how to advance and assess that learning. For students, that inquiry involves the self-conscious questioning and awareness of their approaches to learning. Thus effective teaching and successful learning depend on an understanding of the research on human learning. In our consultations, programs, and publications, we translate that research into meaningful ideas for practice for both teachers and students.
We support faculty members and instructors as they advance as teachers, graduate students as they begin their teaching practice and progress as teachers and professionals, and undergraduates as they develop as learners and scholars.
About the McGraw Center
The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning was established in 1999-2000 with the help of a $5 million gift from Harold McGraw, Jr., class of 1940. The Center was envisioned under the leadership of Princeton’s then president Harold T. Shapiro. "Harold McGraw has had a long devotion to literacy and education, and with this generous gift to Princeton he is helping us redefine teaching and learning for future generations," said President Shapiro (PWB, 3/2/98).
Harold W. McGraw, Jr.
Born in New York City, he graduated from Princeton University in 1940, served as a captain in the Army Air Corps in World War II, and then worked in the advertising agency and book retailing fields before joining McGraw-Hill as a sales representative in its Book Company in 1947. He has held many publishing responsibilities in his over fifty years with the firm, becoming president of the McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1968, and then president of the parent corporation, McGraw-Hill, Inc., its chief executive officer, and chairman of the Board. In 1988, having reached the Board retirement age of seventy, he officially retired, but the Board elected him chairman emeritus. Mr. McGraw also served as a director on two other corporate Boards, CPC International Inc., and the Schering-Plough Corporation.
Among his civic activities, he founded the Business Council for Effective Literacy in 1983 and was its president for the subsequent decade. He also founded The Business Press Educational Foundation in 1984. Some of his other civic activities have included The New York Public Library, the Council for Aid to Education, the International Center for the Disabled, the Princeton University Press, and the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.
Among honors received was the nation’s highest literacy award presented to him in 1990 by President Bush at the White House. He has also been awarded honorary degrees by the Graduate School of the City University of New York, by Ohio University, by Princeton University, by Pine Manor College, by Fairfield University, by Hofstra University, and by Marymount Manhattan College. He also received the Cleveland E. Dodge Medal for Distinguished Service to Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Current Staff
See http://www.princeton.edu/mcgraw/tmc-aboutus.html
The Nature of Teaching & Learning Centers
The concept of teaching and learning centers has existed for over 30 years, but the popularity of this kind of academic support structure has waxed and waned during that time. Although these centers often began at research universities, they are being instituted at many liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well. These centers serve a practical function but build on a theoretical framework from the research on human learning. Over time, professional fields have grown up around the ideas of “faculty development” and “academic skills development,” allowing a venue for conducting and disseminating research on the work of such centers themselves. During her time as Dean, Georgia Nugent recognized that the special issues associated with teaching and learning centers at elite universities warranted their own organization. Thus, she was instrumental in setting up the Ivy+ group of teaching and learning centers consisting of: Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania and Yale. This list includes the three oldest operating centers: Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan.
Centers of teaching and learning often have diverse purposes. The Ivy+ institutions model this diversity and may serve to illustrate this point. Some serve primarily if not exclusively faculty (Dartmouth, the newest center of the Ivies, and MIT); others are predominantly devoted to graduate student development (Yale). Many others serve faculty and graduate students (Brown, Chicago, Harvard, Michigan, and Penn). A few provide services for undergraduates in academic skill development as well (Cornell, Princeton and Stanford). In many cases at colleges and universities, support services for undergraduate learning predate teaching and learning centers, so that Learning Resource Centers (one typical name for such units) already exist on many campuses as separate entities from any Center for Teaching and Learning and usually remain separate. Dartmouth, for example, illustrates this model in that their Academic Skills Center predates and is distinct from their center for teaching and learning. In some cases teaching and learning centers provide much of the technology support for teaching, though this is not true of any of the Ivy+ institutions.
Some of the Ivy+ teaching and learning centers have a strong research focus as well as a service role. The University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching both provides programming and services that review current educational research and conducts its own investigations about teaching and learning issues. MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory actively supports innovative pedagogy through collaborative efforts with faculty in developing and assessing grant-based initiatives in science and engineering education research. Similarly, we at the McGraw Center offer support to faculty in assessing the educational components of grant proposals, for example. We also have begun two separate research studies to assess the effect of our work specifically on our undergraduate peer consultants’ development as learners and our graduate student Teacher Transcript participants’ development as teachers.
The mission statements of the Ivy+ institutions reflect many of the commonalities in this kind of work. Typically these statements include the idea of enhancing (supporting, advancing, improving, strengthening, developing, encouraging, promoting excellence in) teaching or teaching and learning at the University. Several of the mission statements (Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Penn) also emphasize the goal of fostering informed conversation, collaboration, and exchange of ideas about teaching and learning at the University, as do we. And like the McGraw Center, many of the other Centers also specifically highlight the importance of disseminating or building on the research on learning in their work (Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, Oxford, Chicago, Michigan). Some of the Centers draw more particular focus to the diversity in student learning styles or needs (Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Michigan). A few also state that one of their goals is to elevate the status or recognition of teaching at the University (Stanford, Michigan). The mission statements clearly try to capture issues of concern in the culture of their respective universities, as well as areas of emerging importance in higher education more generally.
Contact Information
The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning 328 Frist Campus Center Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544
E-mail: mcgraw@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-2575
Fax: (609) 258-1433
Homepage: http://www.princeton.edu/mcgraw
Links
Bibliography Teaching & Learning Research
The McGraw Center Homepage
