About the Commons

The Learning & Teaching Commons at The Evergreen State College is a learning and teaching center hosted by the Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education. 

Our mission

Evergreen’s Learning & Teaching Commons promotes a generative culture of interdisciplinary teaching and learning that is student-centered, equity-minded, inquiry-oriented, and committed to access and excellence. We aim to promote better classroom experiences that lead to increased student learning and retention. The Commons is conceived as an institutional space where faculty can cultivate practices and develop tools that will give all students the chance to excel and to meet the Six Expectations of an Evergreen graduate.

Our principles

Learning-centered, equity-minded, inquiry-oriented, committed to access and excellence.

Our conceptual framework

We are an interdisciplinary public liberal arts college serving a diverse student body across several locations. We are committed to team teaching, and we have defined a broad set of teaching and learning commitments through the Five Foci that characterize our curriculum and pedagogical practices. The Six Expectations outline what we expect our students to achieve.

1. We will take an assets-based approach to meet students where they are and to maximize their engagement in our distinctive institutional mission.
2. We will deepen our understanding of the experiences students bring to the classroom as well as their successes and barriers to success through disaggregated data  ̶  NSSE data, retention data, Evergreen surveys, focus groups, and other quantitative and qualitative data sources  ̶  and use the data to inform the Learning and Teaching Commons focus.
3. We will embrace the principles of adult learning in designing faculty development opportunities, which include committing resources to convening sustained inquiry-based faculty conversations about teaching and learning over time.
4. We will commit to ongoing teaching and learning about equity pedagogies and curricular innovations.
5. We will bring national conversations about liberal arts education ̶ for example, curricular reform, high-impact practices and signature pedagogies ̶ into campus conversations about teaching and learning, as well as contribute to those conversations.
6. We will operate in service to students’ learning, with special attention to the development of student belonging, engagement, and achievement while meeting the Six Expectations.

The Learning and Teaching Commons is hosted by the Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education.