Andrea Greenhoot is an associate professor of psychology at Kansas University. She was recently named as the new director of the KU Center for Teaching Excellence.

Kansas University has named Andrea Greenhoot, an associate professor of psychology, as the next director of the KU Center for Teaching Excellence.

Greenhoot will succeed Dan Bernstein, a fellow psychology professor, who served as director for 12 years. She will also be the Gautt Teaching Scholar with the center.

The faculty-led Center for Teaching Excellence, or CTE, began in 1997 as a way to build a community of faculty devoted to improving student learning. The center tries to support university instruction by finding new ways to improve learning, developing faculty teaching portfolios and holding workshops, among other efforts.

Greenhoot began working with the center more than a decade ago, when she first joined the KU faculty. Currently she serves as acting associate director and has been a faculty fellow with the center since 2009.

In recent years she has been active with the center’s work on course redesign and transformation, which are efforts to use technology to change the way college courses are taught.

Greenhoot said one of her goals as director will be to push forward the progress in course redesign by expanding new course models to a broader range of academic disciplines, as well as to make new models and their effects on student learning as public as possible.

“Our goal is not only to support high quality teaching and learning practices, but make those practices visible on campus and beyond,” Greenhoot said.

The center will also be involved in evaluating student learning of key skills outlined in the KU Core Curriculum, a new campus-wide undergraduate curriculum that focuses on targeted areas of student learning, Greenhoot said. Additionally, the CTE will be working to expand the preparation of graduate students.

Greenhoot will begin in the role July 13.