Abstract
A good number of this journal’s readers, I would bet confidently, arrive here already with strong notions of a Center for Teaching and Learning’s (CTL’s) functions—providing programming and consultations that enhance teaching, selecting teaching award winners, coordinating multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, providing grants for teaching-related projects, facilitating the scholarship of teaching and learning, etc. Essays in this issue of JCTL represent new articulations of some of these operations, but they also, to various degrees, highlight artifacts/tools that CTL workers develop to ensure the productive engagement of participants along CTL functions. At the same time, tools that CTL staff members develop shape the CTL itself and the role it might play in its specific institutional context.
