Excellent Teaching & LearningOur commitment to excellent teaching and learning is a pillar of Nevada State. Our academic faculty conduct scholarship and possess disciplinary expertise, but their foremost and most essential skill is their ability to help our students learn. Likewise, we hire administrative faculty and related staff with the understanding that they, too, are teachers, responsible for guiding students through the various stages of their journey and increasing their efficacy for success. We empower Nevada State faculty and staff to become learning experts, who understand how learning works and how we can support it. In this manner, we distinguish ourselves by making excellent teaching and learning our highest academic priority, guided by evidence-based practices.
1. Provide educational experiences, led by expert instructors, grounded in best-practices in teaching and the science of learning
2. Commit to becoming a community of learning experts, with an understanding of how we help students internalize, embrace, and utilize complex ideas, and supported by processes that allow us to collect input directly from our students.
3. Schedule first-year experience and gateway courses – ideally led by FT faculty – that forge the strong foundation of knowledge, skills, and efficacy needed to succeed on the degree path ahead.
4. Offer capstone experiences that help students synthesize lessons from multiple points in their college journey and prepare them for a career or graduate program
5. Where possible, develop curricula that can be delivered effectively both online and in-person to give heavily obligated students a choice in their degree pathway
6. Offer professional development opportunities and internal grants supporting innovation that help instructors maximize teaching effectiveness and improve their understanding of student learning
7. Maintain policies and practices that encourage the recruitment of superb instructors (hiring) and incentivize teaching excellence (annual evaluation, P&T)
