I found out about this opportunity for the associate director, faculty and lecturer programs, at Stanford University through a LinkedIn post from my longtime colleague Cassandra Volpe Horii. I reached out to Cassandra about the role, collaborating with Kritika Yegnashankaran, senior associate director at Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and they answered all four of my questions.
Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?
A: This role in the Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning is part of a team that works directly with instructors, in recognition of their need for support and professional development as they carry out the university’s central and vital educational mission. Among others, current high-level institutional priorities focus on our culture of curiosity and inquiry, enhancing student academic life and advancing AI; staff at CTL, including the role featured here, are core to these efforts.
The instructor-facing team in CTL includes a director and several associate directors, each of whom leads signature programs, develops new resources and initiatives, and consults with faculty and lecturers on course design and other individual teaching-related topics. Associate directors also visit classes to provide formative feedback.
In our CTL, associate directors’ portfolios are dynamic; they change over time in order to advance priorities across the university and in both undergraduate and graduate education. For example, while associate directors always develop and lead programs, events and services for Stanford instructors that increase use of evidence-based teaching practices and promote success, learning, belonging [and] well-being for all students, lately they are developing new departmental workshops and leading more discussions about generative artificial intelligence. In recent years, associate directors have also experimented with new formats for engaging instructors, such as place-based “office hours” across a large physical campus. Importantly, CTL associate directors bring disciplinary expertise to their team and to their interactions with instructors, which is important when adapting general pedagogical strategies to specific settings. In these ways, the associate director contributes to both institutional and CTL strategic priorities.
One of the vice provosts that the CTL reports to is fond of saying that CTL lowers the opportunity cost for faculty to teach well and make use of the latest evidence on what works. We also frequently hear from campus leaders that when educational questions arise, the answer is to turn to the CTL. With a high degree of trust and recognition on campus, CTL staff are frequently at the table in institutional initiatives that involve teaching and learning. The associate directors’ positive relationships with instructors and insights into challenges and successes across teaching settings make their expertise essential to strategic and institutional change.
Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?
A: The Stanford CTL reports dually to the vice provosts for undergraduate education and graduate education. In practice, that means that our center is unique at Stanford in our ability to work with all seven schools and with faculty teaching both undergraduates and graduate students across those schools. We partner closely with the offices of the two vice provosts mentioned and with sibling units under them, like the Program in Writing and Rhetoric; Stanford Introductory Studies (home of first-year Civic, Global and Liberal Education, or COLLEGE, requirements); the Haas Center for Public Service; the Bing Overseas Study Program; Academic Advising, and, on the graduate side, the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.
These partners, plus those in units like Faculty Development and Engagement, deans’ offices, and centers that provide specialized educational development support in certain graduate and professional schools, are important when it comes to shared planning and coordinating so as not to duplicate efforts, but also is day-to-day problem-solving.
In our CTL, we are launching some internal systems and structures to map these important relationships and make it easier for the person who joins us in this associate director role to both develop relationships across campus and to leverage the connections that their colleagues have already cultivated.
As a recent example, one of the associate directors of our instructor-facing team has played a pivotal role in a campus initiative to make introductory curricular pathways accessible to all undergraduate students. She did this by designing and launching an annual institute, which prepares departmental teams to pursue funded, multiyear curricular redesign projects. Other associate directors have worked with campus partners to spearhead similar projects of broader campus significance, such as programming to support instructors and departments navigate a new capstone requirement across all Stanford majors and a summer intensive course to introduce graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to the methods and practice of the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Our CTL also has teams that focus on student learning and on academic technology. We’re a bit like having three centers in one. We really try to make the most of these internal relationships and the special insights that we gain by sharing knowledge and expertise across teams. For example, an associate director from our instructor-facing team and an associate director from our academic technology team have co-designed and co-hosted a quarterly series of Teaching With AI Community Shareouts, to enable Stanford instructors across departments and disciplines to learn from and with each other about how to teach effectively and assess student learning with the availability of generative AI. As another example, an associate director from the student learning team has partnered with an associate director from the instructor-facing team to directly connect peer tutors for quantitative gateway courses to course instructors, in order to communicate common bottlenecks students face in conceptual understanding and problem-solving.
Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?
A: For an associate director who is relatively new to educational development as well as the Stanford campus, success in Year 1 would involve a lot of listening, professional development and relationship-building. Activities would likely include shadowing services and attending offerings by team and CTL colleagues to observe principles and practices in action and to discern patterns in the kinds of questions and concerns raised by Stanford instructors. Identifying professional growth areas and devoting some time to professional learning would pay dividends for future work, whether this is getting up to speed on a less familiar area of evidence-based practice or building relevant competencies. Being introduced to faculty and lecturers whom the associate director is likely to work with and having the chance to talk with them one to one would help build familiarity, camaraderie and trust. After this period of scaffolding, running some services or offerings on their own with predominantly positive participant feedback would end the year on a high note. For example, one associate director on the instructor-facing team attended the POD Network’s summer Institute for New Educational Developers and shadowed and attended services and offerings run by all three audience-serving CTL teams within her first year.
By Year 2, the incoming associate director will take primary responsibility for one or more specific programs. Evaluating the efficacy of those programs and intentionally iterating on their design and campus framing will be marks of progress. Relevant metrics might include consistent positive participant experiences and feedback, scaling the program up in size, reaching a broader campus audience, or reaching specific benchmarks in terms of instructional strategies implemented, student learning outcomes achieved or confidence and self-efficacy experienced by either instructors or students. In addition, Year 2 should see expanded recognition and trust in the associate director’s areas of expertise and capacity to help, with questions and requests going to the associate director directly without required mediation from colleagues and collaborations with campus colleagues organized by the associate director themselves. For example, one associate director on the instructor-facing team took over running one of the team’s longest-running event series and introduced opportunities for participants to meet one on one for coffee on their own time based on participant requests for chances to talk more extensively with individual colleagues.
By Year 3, the associate director should be firmly embedded within the campus instructional ecosystem, known to members of the primary audience they serve (faculty and lecturers) as well as staff colleagues in other units. Participant feedback and program evaluation should be stabilized in programs the associate director oversees, and creative reimagining or expansion of offerings to better serve campus needs should be a next step. In addition, the associate director might start examining longer-term sustainability of program outcomes in instructional or departmental contexts and working with campus partners to institutionalize positive change in campus teaching and learning practices. One associate director introduced quarterly follow-up events to help participants of the team’s annual three-day course design institute stay connected with their colleagues as well as extend and deepen their course design and teaching practice.
Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?
A: Past and current associate directors have come from a range of educational and professional backgrounds. They have held Ph.D.s in an array of fields including STEM education, economics, psychology, biology, English and philosophy. Their past professional work has included tenure-track faculty positions, educational research, educational technology and educational development. Associate directors who have left the team and those in allied roles have gone on to educational development roles at other institutions, higher education publishing, professional development and learning design in private industry and leadership positions at Stanford and other higher education institutions. As an example of the last, the hiring manager for this very search has been an associate director on the instructor-facing team and will soon be directing the team!
