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Pacific Crest is the favored
strategic partner of many higher education institutions when it comes to
building human and organizational capacity – whether it be 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 variety of
Faculty
Development Institutes, Custom Publishing Services
and the centerpiece of our ongoing commitment to Process
Education™, the Faculty Guidebook.
Our History
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
275 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. Others publications soon followed.
By 1996, the main focus of Pacific Crest had become the educational
philosophy termed 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
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