Teachers College, Columbia University

Our Mission

• To empower committed learners and leaders to build a smarter, healthier, more just and equitable world through multidisciplinary knowledge creation, policy engagement, and practice innovations across education, psychology, and health.

About Teachers College

Creating a Smarter, Healthier & More Equitable World

• Our name notwithstanding, Teachers College was founded on the proposition that education alone can’t correct our society’s inequalities — that to maximize the life chances of all people, we must also support poorer communities’ physical and nutritional health and psychological wellbeing. Thus, fields such as education psychology, nursing education, nutrition education, special education, conflict resolution and spirituality and education were created at TC, and for more than a century we have prepared psychologists, nutritionists, health educators, speech pathologists and other professionals, as well as teachers and school leaders.
• Today, more than a third of our tenure track faculty are psychologists and health educators, and we continue to take a multidisciplinary approach, combining our strengths across fields to tackle the world’s most challenging problems. We offer more than 100 programs in our four core areas of expertise — education, health, psychology and leadership — and conduct research on topics that range from the impact of poverty on the brain to the legal basis for a Constitutional right to education; from hip-hop pedagogy to the revival of Inca languages in Latin American schools; from the study of motherhood as a developmental stage to the exploration of resilience in military veterans; from the impact of microaggressions on mental and physical wellbeing to language development in children on the autism spectrum; and so much more.
• When we speak of education, we mean education writ large — the study of how people learn, and how they should be taught, in all fields. And that, ultimately, is why we continue to proudly call ourselves…Teachers College.

Our Guiding Values

Teachers College is led by guiding values that reflect our history, our present contexts and our vision for TC, and its members.

• Care and Compassion-We recognize the humanity in each other and seek to make TC a place where all members feel cared for, sustained, and nourished as part of a community.
• Purpose and Passion-We act to improve human flourishing and the public good.
• Agency and Growth-Our purpose and passion pursue the highest forms of knowing, doing and being. 
• Critical Openness-We recognize that effective learning combines critical thinking and adaptability to new ideas, perspectives, and information. We question assumptions, engage in thoughtful analysis, and integrate diverse viewpoints and knowledge sources.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-Our diversity of identities, languages and experiences is integral to our commitment to excellence; we learn from and seek to leverage our diversity to ensure full participation.
• Creativity-We learn through experimentation, play and messiness; we believe in invitations and provocations to revise, engage and innovate; to engage in hospitable imagination.
• Humanity & Humility-We are all co-learners and co-creators of knowledge. Learning is a recursive process and to learn, we must remain critically open.