The C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning (CCTL) opened its doors 20 years ago, with the mission to promote and support teaching excellence and innovation.
"The CCTL provides insights, best practices, coaching, consultation, teaching material development, and design, in order to empower and equip each and every faculty member with the tools to give learners a transformative experience."
-Professor Tsedal Neeley, CCTL faculty chair
We talked with the center’s director, Senior Lecturer Willis Emmons, about its history, how it’s evolved (and how it’s stayed the same), and what the future might hold.
Take us back to the early 2000s. What was the initial impetus behind the founding of the Christensen Center?
Historically, Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty were trained and supported in their teaching through their unit. To supplement this training, in the early 1980s the late Professor C. Roland Christensen, a legendary case method teacher, developed a faculty teaching seminar focused on case method pedagogy. This seminar evolved under the leadership of several senior HBS faculty until it was discontinued in the late 1990s.
Over time, incoming HBS faculty were less familiar with case teaching than in previous generations, and the student body was becoming more heterogeneous. With these trends, Dean Kim Clark recognized the need for more institutionalized support for faculty training and made it a priority in the School’s first capital campaign in the early 2000s.
Valerie Porciello (executive director of the Division of Research and Faculty Development) and several faculty members under the leadership of the late Professor David Garvin, developed the proposal for a teaching and learning center, to be named in honor of C. Roland Christensen. Professor Garvin served as the first faculty chair, followed by Professor Joshua Margolis and Professor Neeley.
The center was founded on five guiding principles that continue to inform all our work: the CCTL serves all faculty, plays a developmental rather than evaluative role, and complements rather than replaces unit-level coaching. Its services are voluntary and confidential.
Tell us about your role and the center’s team.
I joined the CCTL as its inaugural director in 2005. The team that we’ve built over the past 20 years has been a key part of the CCTL’s “secret sauce.” Four members have been with the center for over a decade, including Clare Flaherty (projects and media manager); Tara Abbatello (senior teaching and learning analyst); Nancy Edmunds (manager); and Alexandra Sedlovskaya (associate director). With the recent expansion of our activities, the team has grown to include Maria Lemus (staff assistant) and Karina Lin-Murphy (associate director for course design and pedagogical innovation). We’re a tight-knit group dedicated to supporting faculty in their pursuit of excellence and innovation in teaching.
As you reflect on the center’s work, what have been the core services that you have been delivering across the 20 years?
There are several categories of our services.
- Individual Services
When the CCTL opened, we interviewed junior faculty to identify gaps in their teaching development. A key theme was that for most new faculty, their first case teaching experience was when they stepped into the HBS classroom on day one of their course. To provide an opportunity for pre-term training, we helped introduce a practicum case teaching day within START, the School’s orientation program for new faculty. We view this as the first step in building a long-term relationship with individual faculty in support of their teaching development.
Our core coaching services include class observations, student evaluation analysis, and consultations–for example, class planning or trouble-shooting challenging moments in class.
- Programming
On the programmatic level, we offer faculty teaching seminars for faculty in their first three years at HBS. Beyond focusing on case method teaching skills, these seminars are meant to build a sense of community among the newer faculty members and offer a space to discuss challenges, raise questions, and build a support network with their colleagues.
The CCTL also offers workshops for teaching groups, Elective Curriculum (EC) faculty, Executive Education faculty, course heads, and mentors. In addition, the center has organized a number of all-faculty colloquia over the years including, most recently, on the future of the case method as part of the School’s 2022 Case Centennial celebration.
- Online resources
Since its early years, the CCTL has complemented individual and group services by developing text-based resources, such as tip sheets, and video examples of teaching by experienced faculty. These resources support faculty teaching in the MBA program as well as in Executive Education programs.
How has the Center evolved and changed over these past 20 years?
In 2022 the CCTL undertook a major strategic planning process under the leadership of Faculty Chair Neeley, resulting in a number of new initiatives including:
The Digital Teaching and Learning Hub, which features an extensive online course on case method teaching. It incorporates excerpts from video interviews with experienced HBS faculty, best practice teaching resources, classroom video examples, and an AI bot to help faculty practice their teaching skills. We are developing additional online courses that focus on course heads, course design, and EC teaching.
The Faculty Teaching Coaches Program, which has enabled the CCTL to scale its coaching services by recruiting several experienced HBS faculty to provide one-on-one and group coaching to small groups of newer instructors under a rigorous faculty development model developed by the center. Approximately 20 faculty members participate each year in the program.
The Data Insights Analyst (DIA) Bot, created for faculty in collaboration with IT, synthesizes feedback from student evaluations into actionable insights based on a framework developed by the CCTL.
The CCTL has also collaborated with the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard to offer a Gen AI learning workshop series for faculty and staff focused on applications in teaching and learning.
What do you see for the Christensen Center in the years ahead?
Looking to the future, one of the CCTL’s biggest opportunities is the recent expansion of our scope to include support for course design and pedagogical innovation, including applications of remote and hybrid teaching. In addition, the center will continue to develop resources and activities to support the integration of AI into teaching and learning at the School.
Professor Neeley sees the CCTL over these past four years as evolving into a digital and AI-first teaching and learning center—designed to meet the moment and deliver a transformative experience for both faculty and learners. And I feel the same—it’s wonderful to be part of this evolution and continue building on the center’s progress in the years to come.
