Core Ideas of CIRTL@UCLA

Teaching-as-Research

  • STEM professor as change agent
  • The deliberate and systematic use of research
    methods to advance teaching and learning practices
  • Self-sustained improvement of STEM education

Learning Communities

  • In learning communities, graduate students,
    post-doc, and faculty share learning and discovery
  • Participants collaboratively construct knowledge
    and achieve learning goals
  • Supports growth in teaching and learning

Learning-through-Diversity

  • Excellence and diversity are necessarily intertwined
  • Students and faculty bring an array of experiences and skills
  • Learning of all students is enhanced if all engaged

Pathways of Engagement

There are three levels of engagement to become CIRTL certified: CIRTL Associate, CIRTL Practitioner, and CIRTL Scholar. Each level has specific requirements and you can engage at any level depending on your interests.

The entry level of engagement is CIRTL Associate. This level gives you the foundational knowledge of evidence based teaching and inclusive teaching practices. Building on that knowledge base, you can then become aCIRTL Practitioner by deepening your knowledge and applying it to practicing strategies in the classroom. A CIRTL Practitioner will design and implement a Teaching as Research (TAR) project, and therefore become a self-reflective practitioner. The final level of engagement is a CIRTL Scholar. You will be able to analyze data collected from your TAR project and publicly disseminate your results to the CIRTL community. CIRTL program outcomes conceived in this way permit anyone to enter the CIRTL Network learning community from a wide variety of disciplines, needs, and past experiences, and to achieve success as a teacher at a wide variety of engagement.