The Board of Directors of Pacific Crest is pleased to announce the appointment of Auston Van Slyke as President, effective January 1, 2023. Dan Apple will be stepping back and assuming the role of Vice President of Research and Development.
Auston brings with him a great deal of experience in training and directing performance improvement across multiple fields, including academia and industry. His dedication to improving implementation of the energy transition to renewables has led his journey here and he is looking forward to growing Pacific Crest’s impact in academia as well as commercially.
With its more than 40 years of research and development of tools to improve learning, Pacific Crest is strongly positioned to benefit from Auston’s vision and we look forward to the future with his hand on the wheel. We will be sharing more information about Auston in the next several newsletters.
Pacific Crest is the favored strategic partner of many institutions when it comes to building human and organizational capacity – whether in learning, teaching, mentoring, designing instruction, or assessing. Our work in these areas has resulted in the development and articulation of an educational philosophy called Process Education™, which focuses on the development of broad, transferable learning skills.
Implementation of this philosophy means using processes and tools to create new types of environments in which students take center stage and discover how to improve their learning and self-assessment skills within a discipline. This philosophy also supports the current institutional reform movement that calls for a shift in emphasis from an agenda driven by teachers’ desires and designs to one focused on student learning outcomes. It consistently seeks answers to the question, "How do students learn most effectively and enduringly?" and then works to translate the answer into teaching practice and, ultimately, institutional policy.
To these ends, Pacific Crest offers a wide variety of faculty development Institutes, world-class educational consulting, and custom publishing.
In 1985, Pacific Crest began working with colleges to better integrate the use of technology in teaching, and improve the quality of the teaching and learning processes used by educators.
The first Teaching Institute was held in the summer of 1991 at Wells College in upstate New York. Pacific Crest has now facilitated more than 300 educational institutes. These institutes are “hands-on” and put each participant in the role of learner, educator, and researcher.
In 1992, Learning Through Problem Solving became the first Pacific Crest publication to use a “learning process methodology” in the design of curriculum. Other publications soon followed. By 1996, the main focus of Pacific Crest had become the educational philosophy, Process Education™. (Click to learn more about Process Education.)
This philosophy has become the distinguishing characteristic of Pacific Crest and is at the core of all we do: faculty development, educational consulting, and publishing.
We invite you to view the timeline of our contributions.
Process Education™ is a performance-based philosophy of education which integrates many different educational theories, processes, and tools in emphasizing the continuous development of learning skills through the use of assessment principles in order to produce learner self-development.