Mary Wright Email & Phone Number

Mary Wright is Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning, Executive Director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, and a Professor (Research) in the Department of Sociology, all at Brown University. She is also a former president (2017-18) of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education, the U.S. professional association for educational development.Prior to arriving at Brown, she was Director of Assessment and an Associate Research Scientist at the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT). Mary earned an A.B. in sociology from Princeton University, an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, and an M.A. in higher education administration from the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at U-M.Her research interests include evaluation of teaching and learning innovations, measuring the impact of educational development services, graduate student professional development, and curricular assessment of student learning. Her first book, Always at Odds?, focuses on the development of cultures of teaching and was published in 2008 by SUNY Press. She is also a co-author on the ACE-POD Center for Teaching and Learning Matrix (2017), which created operational standards for Centers for Teaching and Learning, as well as Defining What Matters (2018), which established guidelines for Center for Teaching and Learning evaluation. Mary is a co-editor of the International Journal for Academic Development, the journal of the International Consortium for Educational Development, which seeks to enable academic developers in higher education across the world to exchange ideas about practice and research, and to extend the theory of academic development, with the goal of improving the quality of higher education internationally. Mary's second book, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education, was published by Johns Hopkins Press in September 2023. This book is a study of aims, strategies, tactics, organization, and evaluation approaches for 1200+ CTLs. A collaboratively written book on course design institutes is forthcoming from Routledge in 2025. She is also currently working with another cross-institutional team on a large national (US) survey of educational developers.