Black students continuously experience, fight against and bear emotional scars from
racism, which can lead to increased anxiety and poor mental health outcomes. Some
colleges are just starting to address these issues.
Before the emergence of Internet-based technologies, the classroom was still a room. It featured a teacher at the front delivering learning content to a group of students. Much of today’s teaching and learning is stillconducted within the four walls of the classroom. However, the ubiquity of the Internet, mobile devices, wireless networks and other technologies has torn down the walls of the classroom, enabling a variety of unconventional, location-independent learning environments. By allowing students fl exible learning options, schools can provide more individualized instruction. If implemented properly, online and hybrid learning engage students of all ages, ensure equal access to underserved areas, provide learning opportunities for students with family and job responsibilities, and give older learners a second chance at a college degree. This Special Report will focus on the evolution of learning settings from traditional, instructor-led classrooms to completely virtual, student-centric classes and schools. We will describe and illustrate myriad K-12, college and university learning environments, give examples of how evolving classroom models impact students and teachers, and highlight the technologies that make it possible.
Today’s students use technology to make decisions, manage information and engage socially. They require new ways of learning, communicating, thinking, finding information and problem-solving. To continue to keep students engaged in learning in an environment of ever changing technology, the classroom — be it a familiar on-campus environment or a student’s home or even acoffee shop — must evolve.
It may be the most easily predictable behavior in the undergraduate repertoire. Toward the end of every semester comes the clarion call: "Is there any extra credit I can do to help my final
grade?"
Sometimes the request has a desperate tone. The student recognizes that failure is looming and hopes to avert a dire outcome. In contrast, a student in good standing may be looking for any extra work that could inch their GPA upward. Minimally, if other instructors in your department offer extra-credit options, your students will expect you to do the same and may judge you
harshly if you don’t.
It is 2018 and we still have a crisis with the faculty. For 30 years critics have proclaimed the tenure-track and adjunct models of faculty broken.
Tenure-track models overemphasize a very narrow definition of research and do not encourage or provide accountability for quality teaching or improvement of teaching. For example, studies demonstrate that only 25 percent of faculty are excellent at both research and teaching. Furthermore, the tenure track can commit institutions to wages beyond retirement and to fields of study where enrollments may no longer exist.
The contemporary university has grown to be a fairly complex institution sustained by many competing interests, not all of which are directly concerned with promoting the work of study, broadly conceived. My concern in the fol- lowing is with the quality of the subjective experience of studying that universities are still meant to provide. By subjective experience I mean the
mindful engagement that is study, and my focus is on such study as it is found in undergraduate programs leading to undergraduate degrees. Given the threat of a growing indifference between professors and students concerning their shared engagement in courses offered at the undergraduate level (offered because of professors’ institutional obligations, taken because of students’ degree requirements), I reconsider the subjective investment of mindful engagement that these courses nevertheless represent.
The contemporary university has grown to be a fairly complex institution sustained by many competing interests, not all of which are directly concerned with promoting the work of study, broadly conceived. My concern in the fol- lowing is with the quality of the subjective experience of studying that universities are still meant to provide. By subjective experience I mean the
mindful engagement that is study, and my focus is on such study as it is found in undergraduate programs leading to undergraduate degrees. Given the threat of a growing indifference between professors and students concerning their shared engagement in courses offered at the undergraduate level (offered because of professors’ institutional obligations, taken because of students’ degree requirements), I reconsider the subjective investment of mindful engagement that these courses nevertheless represent.
There’s only one first day of class. Here are some ideas for taking advantage of opportunities that are not available in the same way on any other day of the course.
Throughout this summer article series, we’ve addressed some of the most frequently asked questions about the flipped classroom in higher education. We’ve shared ideas for student motivation, student engagement, time management, student resistance, and large classes. Since this is the final article in the series, I reviewed my notes and the findings from the Faculty Focus reader survey on flipped classroom trends (2015), and there’s one more topic we need to address: creativity.
omen and African Americans—groups targeted by negative stereotypes about their intellectual abilities—may be
nderrepresented in careers that prize brilliance and genius. A recent nationwide survey of academics provided nitial support for this possibility. Fields whose practitioners believed that natural talent is crucial for success had ewer female and African American PhDs. The present study seeks to replicate this initial finding with a different, and rguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which brilliance and genius are prized within a field. Specifically, e measured field-by-field variability in the
emphasis on these intellectual qualities by tallying—with the use of a ecently released online tool—the frequency of the words “brilliant” and “genius” in over 14 million reviews on ateMyProfessors.com, a popular website where students can write anonymous evaluations of their instructors. his simple word count predicted both women’s and African Americans’ representation across the academic pectrum. That is, we found that fields in which the words “brilliant” and “genius” were
used more frequently on ateMyProfessors.com also had fewer female and African American PhDs. Looking at an earlier stage in students’ ducational careers, we found that brilliance-focused fields also had fewer women and African Americans obtaining achelor’s degrees. These relationships held even when accounting for field-specific averages on standardized athematics assessments, as well as several competing hypotheses concerning group differences in epresentation. The fact that this naturalistic measure of a field’s focus on brilliance predicted the magnitude of its gender and race gaps speaks to the tight link between ability beliefs and diversity.
Background/Context:Policy discussions in the U.S. and abroad have become increasingly studded with reference to the results of international tests like PISA. Unlike most assessments, PISA is not designed to measure whether students have mastered a particular school curriculum but rather provide a measure of students ability to meet future challenges irrespective of where in the world they live. Though growing in influence, the concept of a contextless form of accountability has an important antecedent in the history of American education: the Tests of General Educational Development (GED), which were developed in the 1940s to assist the transition of American World War II servicemen and women.
A large-scale analysis of gender disparities in research output and impact finds that while the number of women researchers has increased over the past 20 years, women researchers publish fewer papers on average than men and are less likely to collaborate internationally and to undertake research that cuts across the corporate and academic sectors. At the same time, a report on the findings notes there is little difference between papers published by men and women in impact as measured by citations and downloads.
With what confidence can we guarantee that graduates are ready for the challenges of 21st-century life, work, and citizenship? For years I have worked with district leaders to help principals, teacher coaches, and so many other educators build credibility, coherence, and community around their education transformation efforts. District leaders must manage a myriad of priorities, and I often tell them that the best first step they can take to ensure our students’ success in life, work, and citizenship is to develop and adopt a graduate profile.
Some students are more challenging to teach than others. They require pedagogical skills of a different and higher order. Sometimes it’s easier to sigh and just turn away. And that’s legitimate in the sense that students (indeed, people of all sorts) have to figure things out for themselves. But many of us were such “works in progress” when we were in college, and a teacher (or several of them) ended up being instrumental in moving us in more productive directions. It’s for that reason I’d like us to consider some of these challenging students, each one a unique individual, but many displaying the same counterproductive attitudes and actions. Descriptions of these students come much more easily than solutions to what’s holding them back. Said more directly, my goal here is to start this conversation and ask for your wisdom, insights, and experiences with students who are tough to teach.
What does it mean to be a great teacher? Of course credentials, knowledge, critical thinking, and all other faculties of intelligence are important. However, a great teacher should be much more than credentials, experience and intelligence
Flipped and active learning truly are a better way for students to learn, but they also may be a fast track to instructor burnout.
It’s a new year and a new semester, with new courses and different students—along with perhaps a few favorite
courses and students you get to spend time with all over again, and maybe a couple of each you won’t miss at all. In other words, it’s a new beginning. As we begin again, I thought this characterization of “The Ideal Professor” might be of interest. It’s offered by students who were asked to compare their Ideal professors with their Typical ones. This cohort of juniors and seniors rated professorial characteristics in three areas: personal, course design, and policies and behaviors. The
items were selected for the survey based on research in each of these three areas. Perhaps a bit surprising is the lack of strong distinctions between Ideal and Typical professors. “We found that preferred qualities and behaviors were not wholly absent in the Typical professor—they simply appeared less pronounced than in the Ideal professor.” (p. 182) Despite overall similarities, the research team does describe some of the differences between the two as “striking” and eight of these are listed below. The numbers reflect the percentage of students who endorsed this characteristic for their Ideal professors and the percentage who said they characterized the Typical professor.
Providing a high-quality education where students have the opportunity to take part in active learning is one of the most important things we can do for our students. Doing so, however, is much more involved than we may think. All of our instructional work functions within a broader teaching and learning ecosystem where intentions interact, for better or worse, with the expectations and assumptions we have for ourselves and our students. Falling into the trap of attempting to engage students in a large class discussion, where random students reluctantly respond or provide additional information, is one of the most
common teaching practices applied in the higher education classroom. The problem is, large class discussions can feel like a waste of time as students are unmotivated, unprepared, and therefore unwilling to speak.
Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes-
based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based
approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario
to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs
within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms
include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy
implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.
Keywords: internal quality assurance, external quality assurance, accountability, continuous improvement, learning outcomes
The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is an internationally recognized, peer-based, educational development program involving 24 hours of structured intensive instruction designed to strengthen instructors’ skills in planning, teaching, feedback and critical reflection through a student-focussed process. For over 30 years, the ISW has been offered at more than 100 institutions worldwide as a method of facilitating the development of student-centred, reflective instructors (Day, 2004). Although based on best pedagogical principles for teaching adult learners (Day, 2005), little empirical research has been performed to assess the impact on faculty of participating in the ISW (Macpherson, 2011). Research performed to date has typically shown that individuals who participate in this workshop report that it is transformative to their teaching in the classroom (Macpherson, 2011). The present study sought to extend these findings by conducting a pre-post analysis of ISW and non-ISW participants. The goal of this research was to investigate the influence of the ISW on developing a student-centred approach to teaching in university and college faculty.
The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is an internationally recognized, peer-based, educational development program involving 24 hours of structured intensive instruction designed to strengthen instructors’ skills in planning, teaching, feedback and critical reflection through a student-focussed process. For over 30 years, the ISW has been offered at more than 100 institutions worldwide as a method of facilitating the development of student-centred, reflective instructors (Day, 2004). Although based on best pedagogical principles for teaching adult learners (Day, 2005), little empirical research has been performed to assess the impact on faculty of participating in the ISW (Macpherson, 2011). Research performed to
date has typically shown that individuals who participate in this workshop report that it is transformative to their teaching in the classroom (Macpherson, 2011). The present study sought to extend these findings by conducting a pre-post analysis of ISW and non-ISW participants. The goal of this research was to investigate the influence of the ISW on developing a student-centred approach to teaching in university and college faculty.