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. 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. In 2024, she received the POD Network’s Bob Pierleoni Spirit of POD Award, the organization's highest award (similar to a lifetime achievement award).
Mary's research interests include educational development strategy and practice, evaluation of teaching and learning innovations, measuring the impact of educational development services, graduate student professional development, and curricular assessment of student learning. She is 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 (CTL) evaluation. In 2021-22, she served on the commission (co-chaired by Barbara Snyder, AAU, and Peter McPherson, APLU) that authored The Equity/Excellence Imperative: A 2030 Blueprint for Undergraduate Education at U.S. Research Universities, a report which can be accessed at: https://ueru.org/boyer2030.
Mary's second book, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education, was published by Johns Hopkins Press in 2023. The book is a study of aims, strategies, tactics, organization, and evaluation approaches for 1200+ US CTLs. Her first book, Always at Odds?, focuses on the development of cultures of teaching and was published in 2008 by SUNY Press. A third book about course design institutes, to be published by Routledge in 2025, is written with a collaborative team from the University of Virginia and Colby College. She is currently launching a fouth book project with a collaborative team (Rutgers University, Achieving the Dream, University of Southern Mississippi), which will present results from a large survey of US educational developers about current trends and predicted future directions in the field.
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. She also serves as a consulting editor for Change: The Magazine of Higher Education and College Teaching.
Prior to arriving at Brown, Mary was Director of Assessment and an Associate Research Scientist at the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT). She 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.
