Executive Director of Teaching and Learning Collaborative appointed

Betsy Barre

On March 15, Kami Chavis, Associate Provost for Academic Initiatives, emailed this announcement to faculty and staff:

Dear Wake Forest faculty and staff,

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Betsy Barre has accepted the university’s offer to serve as our next Executive Director of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative. Betsy joins us from Rice University, where she is currently the Associate Director of their Center for Teaching Excellence.

Trained as a comparative ethicist, Betsy began her academic career as a faculty member in departments of religion and philosophy at two small liberal arts colleges: Marymount Manhattan in New York City and Lake Forest College in Chicago. She transitioned to a hybrid faculty-administrative role at Rice University in 2012, working in their newly developed Program in Writing and Communication. In this role, she taught a series of disciplinary-based first-year writing courses and led pedagogical programming for other faculty teaching within the program. Two years later, when Rice launched a formal teaching center, she was appointed as one of two founding Assistant Directors. And in 2016, she was promoted to Associate Director.

In these positions she developed and oversaw numerous instructional development initiatives, all with an eye toward reshaping the culture of an elite research university to further support, value, and ultimately reward excellent teaching on campus. With this came significant collaboration with key partners across campus to work toward significant organizational and institutional change.

Earlier this year, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education selected her as the winner of the 2017 Innovation Award for the development of a tool to help faculty, students, and administrators estimate the out-of-class workload assigned in their courses.

Betsy will officially join us on May 14. My sincere appreciation to the search committee for their extensive involvement in this process: Chris Copeland (Divinity), Adam Friedman (Education), Laura Giovanelli (English), Kenny Herbst (Business), Shayla Herndon-Edmunds (Diversity and Inclusion), Alyssa Howards (German and Russian), Tony Marsh (Health and Exercise Science), Ellen Murphy (Law), and Tim Pyatt (ZSR). Many thanks, as well, to Kristi Verbeke who has served as the Interim Executive Director since fall 2017.

Betsy may be reached at barreea@wfu.edu. Please join me in welcoming Betsy to Wake Forest!

Kami Chavis
Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law