The Center for Principled Problem Solving and Excellence in Teaching

Putting Values Into Practice & Promoting Educational Excellence

Guilford's Center for Principled Problem Solving and Excellence in Teaching (CPPSET) is an academic Center with two primary missions. First, the Center offers values-based educational opportunities through our comprehensive Principled Problem Solving (PPS) and Ethical Leadership (EL) programming. Second, the Center’s Excellence in Teaching (ET) initiative facilitates faculty development focused on values-based experiential teaching, learning, and research. All CPPSET undertakings are rooted in the Guilford College Core Values and are designed to support Guilford College and our broader community in transforming passion into action and seeking a more just, humane, and sustainable world.

Principled Problem Solving

Examples of past CPPSET projects include:

  • Creating an outreach program to stimulate scientific curiosity in elementary school students through hands-on experiments

  • Managing a mobile library for disadvantaged adolescents in Peru

  • Hosting an educational access summit for youth in Rwanda

  • Developing curriculum on environmental racism for children at an Eco-Camp in North Carolina

Principled Problem Solving (PPS) is both a name and a claim. The name, PPS, encapsulates a values-based way of naming and engaging complex problems. The claim is that PPS has been a central part of Guilford’s transformational educational experience since its founding and that it remains an important focus for the college in the 21st Century.

The Principled Problem Solving Model assumes multiple perspectives are necessary for seeking solutions, recognizing that complex problems require contextualized, collaborative, and adaptive approaches to change. It encourages innovations through the consistent use of critical, creative, and constructive thinking.

CPPSET acts as a central hub for principled problem solving across campus through scholarships, fellowships, grants, seminars and internships available to students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Students can also study the Principled Problem Solving Experience Minor, an issues-based teaching and learning experience.

Ethical Leadership

At Guilford, Ethical Leadership means making decisions, building a life, and influencing others to allow yourself, others, and the common good to flourish. This means aligning our personal and professional life and actions with our core values of community, justice, stewardship, diversity, equity, integrity, and excellence.

Anyone can be an ethical leader, whether they have a title or not, whether they are outgoing or shy, whether they coordinating the actions of others or allowing their efforts to be coordinated. Guilford College develops ethical leaders through a development process that heightens values-based decision-making and coordination towards socially just goals at the individual, small group, and community levels.

Excellence in Teaching

Focusing on students is at the heart of the Guilford transformational educational experience. An established focus of these efforts can be found in the teaching and learning that occurs among our faculty, students, and staff. Guilford faculty and staff with teaching responsibilities are committed to being the best teachers they can be, and CPPSET's Excellence in Teaching initiative is dedicated to supporting and advancing this commitment. In particular, CPPSET invites, encourages, and supports experiential teaching and learning that advances PPS research, teaching, and hands-on engagement. The ET Initiative was launched in 2020 building on the college's long history of innovative faculty development and establishing a new endowment fund to support innovative and inclusive pedagogy in classroom, laboratory, and experiential settings.

Giving

Dan and Beth Mosca have made a generous commitment of 2.625 million dollars to fund the Ethical Leadership Scholarship program at Guilford College. We are currently seeking additional gifts to match this commitment and fully fund this recently established section of the PPS Endowment. The EL Scholarship offers selected students a four-year EL Fellowship and an annual $6,000 scholarship.

We are also seeking gifts for our innovative Excellence in Teaching initiative that supports Guilford faculty involved in Center courses and projects.

Support CPPSET with a donation using a convenient, secure online form.