Well here it is already — the end of my first year of full-time teaching. With 25 years of experience in the music industry, and 20 of those years teaching music as an adjunct, I’d felt well-prepared for academia. In fact, I was raring to go.
Last fall, as I walked across campus during the first week of classes, I felt the excitement of being part of the whole enterprise. I traveled the hallowed halls, bustling with the commotion of students. I sat in faculty meetings and glanced around at my new colleagues, the collective braintrust charged with developing, monitoring, scrutinizing, and ultimately teaching the curriculum. I met with my classes for the first time, and in between, retired to the solitude of my very first faculty office. It felt exhilarating. It was what I’d been preparing for all those years in grad school.
OUSA’s LGBTQ+ Student Experience Survey was a mixed methods research project conducted in Novem-ber 2014 designed to gain understanding of the opinions and experiences of Ontario university students who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Questioning, or other orientations or identities that do not conform to cisgender and heterosexual paradigms (LGBTQ+). The purpose of the survey was to identify any gaps that might exist in university services, programming, and supports that can diminish or negatively impact university experiences for these students.
The debate over how universities and colleges should relate to one another has been lively in Ontario for at least two decades.
In this ongoing series focused on flipped and active-learning classrooms, we’re taking a deeper look into how to create successful learning experiences for students. We’ve examined how to encourage students to complete pre-class work, how to hold students accountable for pre-class work, and how to connect pre-class work to in-class activities. Now let’s focus on the challenge of managing the in-person learning environment.
A lot of Ontario teens are feeling anxious and depressed, and their numbers have grown. That’s the take-away from a large-scale study that’s been tracking students in the province for the last 20 years. One-third of the students in the survey were found to have moderate to severe symptoms of psychological distress – an alarming leap from two years earlier, when only one-quarter of students met the same threshold.
Now comes the hard part: figuring out why high schoolers are increasingly describing their lives as overwhelming, anxiety-inducing and stress-filled, and how to help them early because the higher up the grades you go, the worse the situation tends to get. Grade 12s, for instance, were four times more likely than Grade 7s to report high levels of stress, and more than twice as likely to rate their mental health as fair or poor. Older teens were significantly more likely to think about suicide. Yet they were no more likely than younger teens to seek help.
The myth that online education courses cost less to produce and therefore save students money on tuition doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, a survey of distance education providers found.
The survey, conducted by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), found that most colleges harge students the same or more to study online. And when additional fees are included, more than half of distance ducation students pay more than do those in brick-and-mortar classrooms.
The higher prices -- what students pay -- are connected to higher production costs, the survey found. Researchers sked respondents to think about 21 components of an online course, such as faculty development, instructional esign and student assessment, and how the cost of those components compares to a similar face-to-face course. he respondents -- administrators in charge of distance education at 197 colleges -- said nine of the components cost more in an online course than in a face-to-face course, while 12 cost about the same.
As with any provider of products and services to be sold, the value proposition for community colleges depends on who’s buying. Community colleges are confronted with a diverse collection of potential buyers with different needs and their own valuation of what the services are worth. The local community, businesses, state and federal governments, donors, and individual students are potential buyers and community colleges are uniquely poised to fulfill their needs.
I have a PhD in the Humanities and I'm employed.
Gainfully employed, in fact - in every sense of the word, for myself, my employer, my communitym and those I work on behalf of. And I' no employed as a professor, thought I confess that's what I wanted todo when I started my graduate work, and I;ve swum in academic waters since earning my doctorate.
Background/Context: Past research has examined many factors that contribute to the blackwhite achievement gap. While researchers have shown that teacher perceptions of students academic ability is an important contributing factor to the gap, little research has explored the extent to which teacher perceptions of students academic ability are sustained over time or the extent to which teacher ratings of students social and behavioral skills are related to their perceptions of academic ability. The current study focuses on whether teacher perceptions of students academic ability and social and behavioral skills differ by student race and the extent to which ratings at the beginning of the school year explain racial differences in perceptions of academic ability at the end of the year.
Purpose: There are two research questions addressed in this study: (1) To what extent do kindergarten teachers rate black and white students academic ability and social and behavioral skills differently? And (2) to what extent do test scores, fall teacher perceptions of students academic ability, and social and behavioral skills explain racial differences in teacher evaluations of students academic ability in the spring of kindergarten?
This has been a very difficult year for Western. The issue of the President’s compensation and the move for votes of non-confidence at the university’s Senate in the spring deeply affected the community, including the members of the Board of Governors. As is so often the case when organizations face significant challenges, there is an opportunity to review governance policies and procedures and make them better. Over the course of this review, in addition to hearing criticisms and concerns, the Task Force heard a common refrain that we all need to work to make the university stronger. The Board is made up of dedicated individuals who believe in Western and share that interest. The members are committed to working with the Western community to address the concerns that have been raised about how governance is carried out at this institution and to develop practices and processes that will allow the Board and the many stakeholder groups that make up the university, to communicate with and understand each other better.
This report is only a first step. It outlines the concerns that were presented to the Task Force by members of the community and by members of the Board, and provides recommendations for moving forward. Some of those recommendations can be implemented relatively quickly; others will take time and effort. However, it is critical to persevere and to keep the conversation going.
The Task Force also recognizes that Senate is conducting its own review of governance. The Board looks forward to receiving their report and finding opportunities to work with Senate to improve governance at Western.
This report examines community colleges from the perspective of the faculty who deliver their public service – high quality post-secondary education and job training. The report is based on conversations with over 600 faculty at all 24 CAATs,
along with historical research and present-day inquiry into the sector’s financing, management, and operations. The report is focused primarily on perceptions by college faculty that there is a crisis of quality within the college system today.
Whether Mr. John S. Montalbano, Chair of the Board of Governors, and/or individuals in the School of Business identified by the Faculty Association, conducted themselves in the events following Professor Jennifer Berdahl’s publication of her blog on August 8, 2015 in a manner that violated any provision of the Collective Agreement, the UBC Statement on Respectful Environment, or any applicable University policies including whether her academic freedom is or was interfered with in any way.
Competition between providers in any market incentivises them to raise their game, offering consumers a greater
choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at lower cost. Higher education is no exception.
What is “mindful teaching”? It entails, as Elizabeth MacDonald and Dennis Shirley explain, an “openness to new information, a willingness to explore topics that are marginalized in the dominant reform fads of the moment, and a readiness to review one’s previous assumptions as a part of a life-long career marked by critical inquiry, reflection and compassion” (p. 27). That definition seems reminiscent of reflective teaching. It certainly appears related.1 But there seem to be qualitative differences between reflective teaching and mindful teaching. Within the last decade a body of literature has blossomed; it is a literature that borrows from western and eastern contemplative traditions, underscores the role of the self and emotions in teaching, and attempts to consider the conflicts, conundrums, and paradoxes of teaching. Parker Palmer (1998), Irene McHenry and Richard Brady (2009), Rachael Kessler (2000), Linda Lantieri (2001), and Maria Lichtman (2005) are a few of the authors who have ventured into these dimensions of vocational exploration. It is a growing literature and one worth examining. Within this space MacDonald and Shirley, a public school teacher and an academic respectively, offer valuable insights and a description of an unusual program.
It was 7 a.m. on a Sunday in February of 2006 — midway through my second quarter as a Ph.D. student in Irvine,
Calif. — and I had just scared the ever-loving bejeezus out of the weekend custodian. When she opened the door to the German department’s grad-student offices, I don’t think she was expecting to find the legs of a supine 29-yearold woman sticking out from under a desk.
The purpose of this study is to provide an empirically grounded description of the role of the community college student. Drawing on sociological role theory, we articulate the largely unspoken expectations, beaviors, and attitudes to which student s must adher if they are to be successful.
One of the scariest conversations to have with an adviser can be telling that person that you are not interested in an
academic career. Depending on your field, they may have high expectations that you will follow their path to a tenure-track position. But you may not even be sure whether you want to go into academe or another industry, and you’d at least like to talk about your different options. So how do you mention to your adviser that you are considering nonacademic career fields?
School-level conditions nnd school leadership, in particular, arc key issue, in effort.'> LO change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles maner to instructional innovation, what seems mot critical is how leadership practice is undcrrnken. Yet, the practice of cbool leadership bas received limited attention in the research literature. Building on activity theory and theories of d1srribun:d cognition, this paper develops a disrrihute<l perspective on school leadership as a fromc for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice i; constituted m the mteracuon of school leaders, followers, and the situation.
Canada’s average or, in some cases, below-average performance in the OECD’s latest survey of adult skills (known as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)) sparked some observers to call the quality of Canada’s education systems into question. The reason: the results appeared to contradict the prevailing notion that our education systems are among the best in the world.
aculty dread the grade appeal; anxiety prevails until the whole process is complete. Much has been written about ow to avoid such instances, but the potentially subjective assessments of written essays or clinical skills can be specially troublesome. One common cause of grade appeals is grading ambiguity in which the student and faculty ember disagree on the interpretation of required content. Another cause is inequity, whereby the student feels thers may have gotten more credit for very similar work or content (Hummel 2010). In the health-care field specially, these disagreements over clinical-skills assessments can actually result in student dismissal from the program and may lead to lawsuits.