Catherine Haras

Executive Director of the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning (CETL), California State University
Catherine is responsible for promoting educational development through improved teaching practice. CETL serves thousands of instructors each year. In 2019, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) commended the center as a “national model for faculty development”. Catherine has directed CETL since 2011.

Catherine is a late-career librarian and was formerly a public relations executive. She received her bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Washington. She is tenured at the level of full professor at the university library, where she coordinates information curriculum. She is very familiar with the relevant set of standards governing the field of information and communication technology (ICT) literacy, and highly experienced in the education and/or instruction of persons in this field. She served on the international cut score panel that set standards for the Educational Testing Service’s (ETS) iCritical Thinking, the first commercial assessment of information literacy.

Her current scholarship focuses on the role that self-awareness plays in development of faculty teaching identity, including self-regulation (SRL) of faculty as expert learners. In 2015, Professor Haras was named a Distinguished Teaching and Learning Advisor with the American Council on Education (ACE) and edited an ACE white paper, Institutional commitment to teaching excellence: Assessing the impacts and outcomes of faculty development (2017). Her latest co-authored paper is Beyond classroom borders: Linking learning and work through career-relevant instruction (2020) and explores the link between faculty efficacy and career engagement in developing new curriculum.