The Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Wyoming has provided leadership, advocacy, support, faculty development, and instructional services for teaching and learning since its inception in 1991. ECTL services include a variety of workshops, seminars, and multi-session series. Staff also provide one-on-one consultations on writing, instructional media, instructional computing, and other aspects of teaching. Representative events during the 2002-2003 academic year included sessions for new faculty and lecturers, a just-in-time series for graduate teaching assistants, an assessment of learning series, teaching and learning grant development, a large-lecture incentive grants program, the writing of recommendation letters, and a scholarship of teaching and learning initiative called inVISIBLEcollege. Some events feature the discussion of books like Brookfield and Preskill's Discussion as a Way of Teaching:  Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, which the center provides to readers. The ECTL  featured a three-session discussion series on Warming up the Chill:  Teaching Against the Structures in April 2003.  For more information about ECTL events and to register, go to www.uwyo.edu/ctl or call 307-766-4847.

Warming up the Chill:  Teaching Against the Structures is the second book published by the ECTL.  The first, The Ellbogen Experience:  Essays on Teaching by Award-Winning University of Wyoming Faculty, is a collection of eleven essays written by recipients of the Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award.  Jane Nelson, UW Writing Center Director, and James K.Wangberg, the founding director of the ECTL, edited the collection, published in 2000, which was the twentieth anniversary of John P. "Jack" Ellbogen's creation of the award.  The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees honored Mr. Ellbogen's extraordinary contributions and commitment to the university by renaming the Center for Teaching Excellence the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning in September 2001.