The Teaching and Learning Circle topics are proposed by faculty members, who invite interested colleagues to work with them over the year in learning more about that particular topic. Forty faculty members are presently participating in seven Teaching and Learning Circles, covering such topics as fostering undergraduate research, increasing students’ responsibility for their learning, improving student presentations, using newspapers in class, responding to student writing, integrating Web pages into courses, and publishing the scholarship of teaching.

Each Teaching and Learning Circle meets three or four times each year to explore its chosen topic. In addition, members of the circles may read and discuss articles pertaining to the topic, review each others’ syllabi, examine each others’ student work, and visit each others’ classes. At the end of each semester, the members of the Teaching and
Learning Circles give brief presentations about their work in the circle to the rest of
their faculty colleagues during the biannual "Celebrating Teaching" colloquium.