Center for Teaching and Learning at SCUP

Newman and Yale University presented their new Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at the Society for College and University Planning Conference (SCUP). Designed by Newman, the CTL is the brand new heart of pedagogy on the Yale campus. The strategies reflected in the design process for this new space were Community, Transparency, Flexibility, and Incubation. Please watch the video below to see how these strategies were applied to the new Center for Teaching and Learning.

A university's mission is to help young people prepare to thrive in the new normal of perpetual change. This demands new programs that advance the evolution of the educational process. These programs need architecture that enables new pedagogies and creates laboratories to reinvent them, approaching teaching and learning as experimental, iterative processes with students themselves as change agents.

Yale’s CTL illustrates the special opportunities and challenges of programming and designing for these dynamic programs and their transitioning organizations.

Yale assembled CTL from previously separate groups devoted to helping students study, write, and research, and faculty to teach and use instructional technology, to create an organization for improving student, faculty, and staff learning, teaching, and working holistically.

Yale’s decision to locate CTL in Sterling Memorial Library gives it visibility and accessibility, symbolizing its importance to the University and equipping Sterling to join other evolving libraries as a collaboration center.

The resulting facility creates a welcoming, inspiring place for fostering community centered on innovative teaching and learning.