I have been doing some reading and thinking about hard courses. Courses need to be challenging, but when they become too hard, students stop trying and little learning results. So how do we find that sweet spot between hard and not too hard? More importantly, how do we create that sweet spot in our own courses through the decisions we make about content, assignments, and exams?
The Survey of Earned Doctorates, the data source for this report, is an annual census of individuals who receive research doctoral degrees from accredited U.S. academic institutions. The survey is sponsored by six federal agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Agriculture, and U.S. Department of Education. These data are reported in several publications from NSF’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. The most comprehensive and widely cited publication is this report, Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities.
Critical thinking is no longer a strange concept in this world. It is being talked about all over, from university to the
workplace, from developed countries to poor ones. The importance of thinking critically has never really been
considered properly until recently. In fact, critical thinking is believed to be the new intellect of the modern era that
reflects a person’s ability to analyze daily problems and make the right decision.
As it’s not a specific talent that people are born with, critical thinking requires practice and effort. Ironically, while
critical thinking has become popular all over the world, not many people know how to develop their critical thinking
skills effectively. Therefore, we are about to show you how you can effectively develop these skills.
For the first time in many years I am teaching a freshman course, Introduction to Philosophy. The experience has been mostly good. I had been told that my freshman students would be apathetic, incurious, inattentive, unresponsive and frequently absent, and that they would exude an insufferable sense of entitlement. I am happy to say that this characterization was not true of most students. Still, some students are often absent, and others, even when present, are distracted or disengaged. Some have had to be cautioned that class is not their social hour and others reminded not to send text messages in class. I have had to tell these students that, unlike high school, they will not be sent to detention if they are found in the hall without a pass, and that they are free to leave if they are not interested. Actually, I doubt that the differences between
high school and university have ever been adequately explained to them, so, on the first class day
of next term, I will address my new freshmen as follows:
Welcome to higher education! If you want to be successful here you need to know a few things about how this place works. One of the main things you need to know is the difference between the instructors you will have here and
those you had before. Let me take a few minutes to explain this to you.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tasked with examining the future of online
education have
returned with a simple recommendation for colleges and universities: focus on people and process,
not technology.
Back in 2013, an MIT task force presented a vision of undergraduate education at the institute in which students spend half as much time on campus as they do today. Freshman year would be fully online, and instead of a senior year, students would take online continuing education courses to refresh their knowledge and add new skills. That vision leaned heavily on MIT’s work with edX, the massive open online course provider it founded with Harvard University.
Residents of Southwestern Ontario are most likely to identify “jobs/unemployment/wages” as the most important issue currently facing the Ontario government.
Small and simple ways to improve your academic writing
In the fall of 2014, then Minister of Employment and Social Development Canada, the Honourable Jason Kenney,
appointed the Panel on Employment Challenges of New Canadians to consult with immigrant-serving organizations,
regulators, employers and other stakeholders.
The Panel was asked to identify and report on successes, innovative approaches and promising practices on the licensing, hiring and retention of recent immigrants, as well as the challenges of this process faced by employers. This work will help to shape strategies for better integrating newcomers into the workforce.
In-person consultations were held in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. During
these events, the Panel met with over 150 organizations closely involved in the issue of employment for new Canadians.
The Panel also posted an online survey open to all Canadians and received input from over 600 respondents—including
many immigrants themselves.
Change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement, and extraordinarily difficult to sustain (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006, p. 1).Sound familiar? I am sure it does if you have spent any time in a school leadership role!
Continuous, sustainable educational improvement is possible. However, it is most dependent on successful leadership. Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink make such a case in their book Sustainable Leadership and further note a relevant truism: Making leadership sustainable is difficult too (p. 1). This easy-to-read text is full of such principles, each of which makes the book a powerful and timely read. This book addresses one area of school leadership that is a most important, yet often neglected subject in education today: educational improvement as correlated with leadership sustainability. Kouzes and Posner (1995), support such an integrated concept in their classic read The Leadership Challenge by relating the following: There are monumental differen es... (preview
truncated at 150 words.)
When Bernie trailed Behind me to my office after class looking crestfallen and slumped into the chair to study with some intensity the laces on his sneakers, i realized that a battle of epic proportion was being waged. after some moments of silence, he blurted out that he was dropping out of school, that he just didn’t feel connected to the students in my class or to students in any other of his classes for that matter. he felt much more comfort- able with the construction crew he worked with every summer. maybe, after all, this was his true calling—being in the open air with scuffed work boots and dirt under his fingernails. maybe this was where he really should be. maybe college just wasn’t for him.
In 2005, the report issued by the Rae review of college and university education in Ontario, Ontario: A Leader in Learning, re-stated an estimate that 11,000 new university faculty would be required by 2010. No source was cited, nor any of the assumptions that underlie the conclusion. OCUFA subsequently conducted an analysis that showed Ontario universities would have to hire nearly 11,000 full- time faculty between 2003 and 2010 to replace retiring professors and to reduce the student-faculty ratio to a level at comparable US institutions and at which Ontario could be a true leader in learning
"If you look closer," sang Smokey Robinson, “it’s easy to trace the tracks of my tears.” Clearly he never experienced the flow of tears at the end of a semester.
Whenever midterm and final exams loom, students’ tears during faculty office hours become as commonplace as requests for extra credit and do-overs. Low grades produce desperation and despair. In deciding how to respond, professors first must identify the reasons for the crying because not all tears are equal.
Some students cry because they lack the necessary skills to succeed in the course. Others are dealing with the stresses of life and, particularly if they're young, haven't developed coping mechanisms. There are tears from students who are dealing with the very real traumas of microaggressions, racism, homophobia, rape, and the failure of their institutions to recognize those pressures or listen to their voices. And there are tears that surely produce less empathy — from the grade grubbers crushed by a B or the slackers who simply didn't do the reading but know how to turn on the waterworks.
Teacher education programs must help teaching candidates to link the moral purpose that influences them with the tools that
will prepare them to engage in productive change.
Teaching at its core is a moral profession. Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose. At the Faculty of Education, University of Toronto, we recently examined why people enter the teaching profession (Stiegelbauer 1992). In a random sample of 20 percent of 1,100 student teachers, the most frequently mentioned theme was "to make a difference in the lives of students." Of course, such statements cannot be taken at face value because people have a variety of motives for becoming teachers. Nonetheless, there is a strong kernel of truth to this conclusion.
This is the first article in a series designed to help you create an Individual Development Plan (IDP) using myIDP, a new Web-based career-planning tool created to help graduate students and postdocs in the sciences define and pursue their career goals. To learn more about myIDP and begin the career-planning process, please visit: http://myidp.sciencecareers.org.
Public concern over the employability of youth has reached pandemic levels. Over the last several years, whole storehouses of ink have been spilled exploring the challenges facing a “lost generation” of highly educated, jobless youth, struggling under the yoke of student debt and low wages. Over time, this public concern has given rise to public doubt over the value of sending a generation of youth to post-secondary education.
People abused by angry discipline as children, may tend to abuse or overly punish other people or themselves for perceived wrongs in their adult lives. Passive and aggressive personality types are often attracted to each other. In some individuals, aggressive or passive personality traits may be genetically inherited. The aggressive personality may feel weakened by having guidelines or boundaries for anger. Anger is a normal human emotion, and these guidelines can help express anger in a healthy way:
One of my doctoral students just got a tenure-track assistant professorship. That’s excellent for her, but a decade ago, it wouldn’t have rated mention in a newspaper column. Of course, that was before the amount of tenure-track openings dropped like a barometer during hurricane season. Today, getting a tenure-track position feels more like a "Man Bites Dog" event.
During that same period, undergraduate enrollment at American colleges and universities continued to rise — as it has for decades. Clearly more and more students need to be taught, so where have all the teaching jobs gone?They’ve gone to the same people who have been doing a lot of our undergraduate teaching all along: contingent faculty members, meaning graduate students and adjuncts. That’s not exactly news to anyone who has been watching the faculty labor market — or to the graduate students doing so much of the work. In the humanities, we’ve seen nontenure-track jobs (NTTs) multiply year after year. As David Laurence of the Modern Language Association has shown in PowerPoint talks he’s given on the subject, the proportion of faculty jobs that are tenured and tenure-track has been dropping steadily over the past two generations.
Students are the innovators of the future, and to succeed they need access to modern, high-quality programs at Canadian educational institutions. Universities and colleges are built to educate students, develop global citizens, support research, and foster a sense ofcreativity that will benefit Canadian society both socially and economically.
The promotion of mental health and well-being in our students, faculty, and staff is important to the University of Calgary. Given the symbiotic relation between health and education, Universities are increasingly recognized as places to promote the health and well-being of the people who learn, work and live within them. Research-intensive universities create cultures that demand high performance while promoting excellence and achievement, and also carry the risk of stress, stigma, and challenges to mental health. With the recognition of the importance of promoting mental health and intervening to address illness in a timely way, we join groups across Canada and beyond that are committed to enhancing the mental health of university students, faculty, and staff.
When it comes to Canadian universities, the level of funding doesn’t predict performance, according to a new report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). In its newest and most comprehensive analysis of Canadian postsecondary systems, HEQCO finds that Ontario and Nova Scotia are top performers overall despite lower per-student operating costs, while other provinces that spend the same or in some cases considerably more money achieve average or below average performance.