In my educational leadership work, I’ve talked with administrators and faculty from across the country who are interested in creating safer and more supportive, engaging, and inspiring school
environments.
But we are confronted with the challenge of disengagement in America’s schools. Simply put, schools are places here too many kids do not want to be. And when this happens, they vote with their feet to leave, or stay and truggle, dissociate, or worse. A Gallup study showed that 24 percent of fifth graders were disengaged. That percentage grew to 39 percent for middle school students and 56 percent of students in high school. (And that 56 percent doesn’t include all those disengaged youths who had already dropped out.)
Part-time faculty teach approximately 58% of U.S. community college classes and thus manage learning experiences for more than half (53%) of students enrolled in community colleges (JBL Associates, 2008). Often referred to as contingent faculty, their work is conditional; the college typically has no obligation to them beyond the current academic term. At many colleges, the use of contingent faculty began with hiring career professionals who brought real-world experience into the classroom. Historically, colleges also have hired contingent faculty when enrollment spiked, the college needed to acquire a particular type of expertise, or full-time faculty members were not available to teach a particular course.
Increasingly, however, contingent faculty have become a fundamental feature of the economic model that sustains community college education. Because they typically have lower pay levels than fulltime faculty and receive minimal, if any, benefits, part-time faculty are institutions’ least expensive way to deliver instruction. As public funding, as a percentage of college costs, has steadily declined—and as colleges have been forced to find ways to contain costs so they can sustain college access—the proportion of part-time faculty has grown at colleges across the country. Today part-time faculty far outnumber full-time faculty at most colleges.
Wilkins presents interesting concepts in Education in the Balance: Mapping the Global Dynamics of School
Leadership regarding principles of school leadership. Wilkins notes that innovation and greater ownership are needed in leadership. In the introduction, he identifies that Education in the Balance connects several
related but different fieldseducational policy, globalization, philosophy, the future purpose of schooling,
leadership publications, school effectiveness, comparative education, and academic disciplinary writing
centered around educational geography.
ABSTRACT
During the past two decades community colleges and technical institutes in several jurisdictions, including parts of Canada, the
United States and Australia, have been given the authority to award bachelor degrees. One of the motivations for this addition
to the mandate of these institutions is to improve opportunities for bachelor degree attainment among groups that historically
have been underserved by universities. This article addresses the equity implications of extending the authority to award
baccalaureate degrees to an additional class of institutions in Canada’s largest province, Ontario. The article identifies the
conditions that need to be met for reforms of this type to impact positively on social mobility and inequality, and it describes the
kinds of data that are necessary to determine the extent to which those conditions are met. Based on interviews with students,
faculty, and college leaders, it was found that regulatory restrictions on intra-college transfer from sub-baccalaureate to
baccalaureate programs and lack of public awareness of a new type of bachelor degree may be limiting the social impact of this
reform.
As we continue our ongoing series focused on the flipped classroom in higher education, it’s time to tackle another frequently asked question: “How can I flip a large class?”
I like this question because it’s not asking whether you can flip a large class, but rather what’s the best way to do it.
Faculty who teach large classes are challenged not only by the sheer number of students but also by the physical space in the classroom. Having 100, 200, or 400+ students in class means teaching in large lecture halls with stadium seating and seats that are bolted to the floor. It’s not exactly the ideal space for collaboration and group discussions, so the types of flipped and active learning strategies you can use are more limited.
The current public assumption that safe spaces and trigger warnings conflict with academic freedom and are the result of political correctness gone mad is a false dichotomy. If students today are indeed more fragile, then it is vital that we in higher education understand: (1) the specific nature of this sensitivity and (2) what colleges can do to help.
After this divisive election, we will need more capacity for talking about controversial issues. While the anonymity of social media may have escalated invective, it has not made for more ease with difficult conversations. Technology has allowed a generation to end relationships by text message, or even by “ghosting” an ex -- deleting a relationship from your life without any conflict or effort.
The practice of shared governance is contested terrain in American higher education. Despite consensus that shared governance is a collaborative approach to decision-making characterized by the distribution of authority across various institutional actors (e.g., faculty, senior administrators, trustees), models and norms of effective shared governance remain elusive. Indeed higher education critics within and beyond the academy often identify the practice of shared decision-making as a major barrier to innovation and fiscal efficiency, two organizational qualities deemed essential for survival in today’s rapidly changing global knowledge economy.
From November to March is prime time for academic burn-out in graduate programs — I’m convinced of that. Perhaps it’s a seasonal thing; it can be easy to sink into a trough of exhaustion and stress, and not climb out of it for months. But rather than just the seasonal doldrums, my sense is that clinical depression, extreme anxiety and other mental health issues are becoming more common in graduate programs as well as in undergraduate education.
I asked one fellow student her opinion of this, and she replied, “it seems like everyone I know in academia is depressed.” On another occasion when I was very unwell, I was told that “everyone” has some kind of breakdown during the PhD; my troubles were nothing to worry about!
The question of how to hold Ontario’s universities accountable to the needs of students is a relatively complex one. One must be careful to balance the need for academic freedom with the public’s (and especially students’) right to be assured that its considerable investments into postsecondary institutions are being used effectively and appropriately. OUSA’s Accountability paper offers recommendations to improve quality assurance and strategic goal-setting in Ontario’s universities. In essence, it describes students’ vision of to whom, for what, and how universities should be held accountable.
In Canada, international students working on their PhD are given funding for four years. After that, they are on their own.
Canadian society and the Canadian academy are proud of their openness and diversity. Every year, thousands of international students are encouraged to embark upon undergraduate and graduate studies at Canadian institutes of higher education. Indeed, the drive amongst Canadian universities to attract top-quality international students in greater numbers is
intensifying. And yet, there is a significant systemic problem for those international students in the arts and humanities who
undertake doctoral studies in Canada.
The Premier's Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel today released its final report, which will help Ontario develop an integrated strategy to meet the needs of our dynamic economy for today and tomorrow.
HubSpot is 9 years old. I consider that we spent our first 6–7 years in “startup” mode, where we got through
product/market fit and got our customer economics to work. Over the last few years, we’ve been in “scale-up” mode, where we’re adding fuel into our engine and growing fast in a great market with nice barriers to entry. It turns out that many of the skills I need as the leader of a scale-up are much different than the skills I needed as the leader of a startup. This article attempts to lay out some of the skills and tools I’ve needed to develop in this scale-up phase.
I remember the first time I tackled the controversial subject of students as customers. It was in an in-house newsletter, well before the advent of the Internet and e-mail. Even so, I had numerous phone calls, memos, encounters on campus, and discussions about it in every activity the teaching center sponsored for the next year. I hadn’t even taken a side; I had simply listed arguments for both sides. But, as far as the faculty were concerned then and pretty much since, there aren’t two sides. Students are not customers. Tuition dollars do not buy grades. Education does not come with a money-back guarantee. And students don’t get to choose what they learn—well, they do, but if they don’t choose to learn what we require, the consequences are costly.
The reading and math skills of 15-year-old immigrant students, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) between 2000 and 2012, vary across regions of Canada.
Regional variations were also observed in the high school and university completion rates of youth who immigrated in Canada before the age of 15, as measured in 2011.
There’s a widely circulated YouTube video you may have seen called “A Conference Call in Real Life.” To spoof the strange, stilted dynamics of conference calls, it replicates them in a face-to-face setting. Participants stiffly announce their names at the door of a meeting room, are suddenly interrupted by bizarre background noises, and find themselves inexplicably locked out of a room they were just in.
If you haven’t watched it, do. You’ll recognize the familiar awkwardness of virtual meetings, where the rhythm of conversational interaction is thrown wildly askew by technological hiccups and the absence of visual cues.
This report provides a systems perspective on the state of skills and higher education in Canada and identifies areas where the sector could improve in producing highly skilled graduates. I
Ceasing need-blind admissions is a politically tenuous move for colleges and universities -- need-blind policies,
associated with meritocracy and equal opportunity, cut to the heart of institutional values that many students, staff and faculty hold dear.
But sometimes those values have run up against cold, hard finances. Admitting students without considering their need for financial aid can make it difficult to control budgets from year to year. That’s particularly true when the policy is paired with promises to meet the full demonstrated financial need of applicants. And it is that combination of policies that truly makes it possible to tell a student without money that he or she is on equal footing with a trust-fund teen during admissions decisions.
Four years ago, when I started work as a lecturer in a rhetoric department, I knew very little about the field. My Ph.D. is in English, and I had only taught in English departments up until then. But among the handful of things I did know about teaching this subject was the concept of the rhetorical triangle.
That device has proved useful over the years — both in my classroom and in my own writing. But lately, as my career has shifted from being an instructor to helping other faculty members improve their teaching, I’ve been thinking about how the rhetorical triangle is a handy way to help faculty members understand some of the fundamental challenges of student-centered teaching.
It was the 10th or 11th week of semester, a time when I’d gotten to know my students – or at least their names and faces – fairly well. I knew what most of them thought about the topics we’d covered, I knew the sounds of their voices. I knew some of their opinions on climate change, and some of their thinking on genetically modified food.
And so it was pretty odd to see someone new in class that day.
We were covering diversity in science. Looking at why far too many of our professors look, to put it bluntly, like older versions of us. White. Male. Heterosexual. Dashing.
And here was a new face. Was he…angry? Was he threatening? Did his shirt actually say “White Fight”? What does that mean? Was he tweeting what I was saying?
It is naïve to think that a finished teaching product can be created in four semesters of any teacher preparation program. These programs instead provide the knowledge and skills for preservice teachers to begin their journey toward being and becoming skillful professionals and eventually, expert teachers. Toward this end, there are two necessary elements: developing knowledge and engaging in reflective analyses.