About
Cynthia Alby, Ph.D., is a teacher education generalist who has spent most of her career immersed in avid cross-disciplinary idea synthesizing. She studies pedagogy, sociology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and anything else that might yield clues to her primary research question: How might we re-enchant learning to help faculty and students flourish?
Dr. Alby began her career in her hometown of Atlanta, teaching high school Latin and English. She is now Professor Emerita of Teacher Education at Georgia College & State University, Georgia’s public liberal arts university, where she taught for 25 years. While there, she co-authored Learning That Matters: A Field Guide to Course Design for Transformative Education with three colleagues, a book now used by many professional learning communities. She also co-founded Georgia College Early College, a public, campus-based school for grades 6-12, with a $2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and delivered a TEDx Talk based on that work. She was one of the lead developers of GC Journeys, the university’s award-winning program for incorporating high-impact practices, and the online version of her secondary education program was ranked #1 in the nation by Online Masters Degrees.
Perhaps the best evidence of her devotion to teaching was her dual appointment as lead developer for the Governor’s Teaching Fellows Program at the University of Georgia, serving as Georgia’s “Teacher of Teachers.” Supporting over 600 of Georgia’s top university faculty across 80 disciplines gave her a unique, state-level perspective on her own development and the development of others and honed her ability to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and pedagogical innovation in higher education.
Dr. Alby has won four university-level awards (two for scholarship of teaching and learning, one for service, and one Department of Excellence award) along with a national teaching award, the Charles Dunn COPLAC Award. Since 2023, she has written and spoken extensively across the country on artificial intelligence in higher education and has been featured on a variety of podcasts, including Teaching in Higher Ed. She is passionate about civil discourse, embodied and vertical learning, well-being strategies, and relationship-rich pedagogy, as well as experimenting with minimizing grades while maximizing learning.
Her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Classical Languages is from Xavier University, her master’s in Classical Archaeology is from the University of Cincinnati, and her doctorate in Literacy and Language Education is from the University of Georgia.
When she retired from Georgia College, she couldn’t imagine a better adventure than moving to Helena to teach at Carroll College, returning to her Catholic college roots and reveling in the natural wonders of Montana. She is a huge fan of dogs, wildlife, hiking, mountain biking, and the arts.
