A number of programs are exploring options for applied scholarship within the PhD.
What happens when a high-school student from a low-income family wants to attend a private college 100 miles away, but has a parent whispering in her ear to look closer to home? The "Survey of Admitted Students: Targeting Yield Strategies," may provide some answers, as well as more questions.
The report, produced by Eduventures, a consulting company, and written by Kim Reid, a principal analyst there, distilled insights from more than 100,000 high-school students nationwide.
How often have you thought, “My people always tell me what’s really going on.”
Hundreds of leaders have told us that their followers are open with them. These leaders believed that they were getting honest feedback and were being asked the tough questions. Unfortunately, this is rarely true. In fact, we’ve come to think of this
common belief as a myth—a myth consistent with the concept of seduction of the leader, which was introduced to us more than twenty-five years ago by our colleague Dr. Rod Napier.
The Wounded Leader: How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis (2002), a recently published book by Richard Ackerman and Pat Maslin-Ostrowski, asks educational leaders to reflect on personal and profound questions - ones they are not likely to have been asked in a formal interview or performance evaluation. Ackerman, co-director of the International Network of Principals’ Centers and Associate Professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Graduate School of Education, and Maslin- Ostrowski, an Associate Professor of educational
leadership at Florida Atlantic University, have spent the past seven years asking school leaders about “wounding” or “crisis” experiences in their leadership practice, and how they make sense of this wounding in terms of
their personal and professional lives.
The focus of the article is to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster
greater creativity. I bring together art education research, creativity research, and learning sciences research to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster creative learning outcomes.
We know students are afraid of making mistakes, often dreadfully so. And so we talk a good line about the learning potential inherent in mistakes.
But are we afraid to let students make mistakes? Is it just a problem with students not wanting to be wrong, or does our need to control learning experiences keep students from making mistakes?
Academic program reviews — or APRs, as they are known in administrative-speak — are both a blessing and a curse.
A well-executed internal review can be a blessing when it leads to a helpful external review that allows your department to shine and be appreciated for its strengths. The curse, of course, is that someone (often the department chair) has to convene a committee (not another committee!) of faculty members (already feeling overburdened) to write a self-study before any external reviewer can be brought to campus for a "tweed on the ground" evaluation of your program.
There’s mounting evidence suggesting that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable. But are these evaluations, commonly referred to as SET, so bad that they’re actually better at gauging students’ gender bias and grade expectations than they are at measuring teaching effectiveness? A new paper argues that’s the case, and that evaluations are biased against female instructors in particular in so many ways that adjusting them for that bias is impossible.
Moreover, the paper says, gender biases about instructors -- which vary by discipline, student gender and other factors -- affect how students rate even supposedly objective practices, such as how quickly assignments are graded. And these biases can be large enough to cause more effective instructors to get lower teaching ratings than instructors who prove less effective by other measures, according to the study based on analyses of data sets from one French and one U.S. institution.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is now the law of the land.
Replacing No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) does more than realign the federal government’s role in education. It also elevates technology’s use in education in unprecedented ways. These changes require new thinking from leaders at the school, district and state level.
We’re releasing this handbook as states prepare their initial plans for state accountability requirements and other provisions of the new law. At the time of this writing, many states appear to be gravitating toward familiar models, albeit with considerable improvements in data, targeted interventions and instructional strategies that reflect the law’s emphasis on flexibility and local control. But there are opportunities for more dramatic transitions in what accountability means and how it is measured in schools, as well as in new models of teaching and learning. Technology plays a vital role in these areas, and ESSA provides new ways to help states and districts make these visions a reality.
The past several decades have seen an interest in learning surge. It’s always been part of our educational endeavors, but the recent focus on it has been intense—that is, for teachers. Our interest is not shared by most of our students. They are still pretty much all about grades, preferably those acquired easily. They will work for points, but not very enthusiastically, if at all, without them.
Whether they led a company or a country, history's best leaders understood the importance of providing the motivation and direction to achieve larger goals. Poor leaders lose the faith and trust of the people they lead, while great leaders seem to
lead without effort. The character, actions and thoughts of a leader, good or bad, permeate an organization. Your goal should be to demonstrate the best qualities of a leader while encouraging the same from those who follow you. These 35 quotes about leadership will help you think about and guide your actions.
This article examines the elusive concept of safety in liberal arts classrooms which are often contoured by a plurality of social, cultural, political, psychological, historical, and discursive forces and performances. Using select principles from adult education and social work with groups as an organizing metaphor, the article discusses the classroom as a large group, the changing student body, and, especially, the impact of diversity and inclusivity in liberal arts settings. Because the aim of liberal arts education is usually to promote independent and critical thinking, open-mindedness, and greater communi cation and decision-making skills, its goals foster, to a great degree, citizen engagement that empowers persons to participate in
collective actions toward greater equality and justice in communities both locally and globally. Class- room safety is essential to these aims because it increases opportunity for free, critical, and independent thought necessary for progressive, egalitarian, and justice pursuits. The article explores safety, including dialogic practices and reflection on relations of power within the classroom, for its significant role in fulfilling liberal arts aspirations.
An emerging priority in medical education is the need to facilitate learners’ acquisition of quality improvement (QI) competencies.
Accreditation bodies in both Canada and the United States have included QI and patient safety in their core competencies.
In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, many learning institutions are re- evaluating the focus of the education they provide and embracing disciplines that provide hands-on learning and real-world experience. As a result, one can find an increasing emphasis on applied research at colleges—that is, research specifically intended to help businesses and industries find solutions to practical problems and to help develop products and services.
One night during the third year of my PhD program, I sat on my bed with a packet of tranquilizers and a bottle of vodka. I popped a few pills in my mouth and swigged out of the bottle, feeling them burn down my throat. Moments later, I realized I was making a terrible mistake. I stopped, trembling as I realized what I’d nearly done.
I called a friend and met her in a bar exactly halfway between my house and hers. That night changed things for both of us. She met the love of her life—the bartender, who she later married. And I decided I wanted to live. The morning after, I found a therapist and considered quitting my PhD.
In showing respect for their favorite professors, today’s college students have ventured well beyond the proverbial
apple.
An Indiana University at Bloomington instructor was once given chicken livers … five pounds of them, from an adoring student whose father was a butcher. He gladly accepted and enjoyed the tasty treat. One Southern Methodist University instructor was presented with “a limited-edition Snickers bar” that said “goofball” on it. Apparently the student saw it and thought of her. For now, the candy bar remains in her office, she said, at least until she “gets hangry.”
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.
This year, students recommend that the budget represents a commitment to increasing affordability, supporting student health and employment, and expanding student mobility.
To achieve these ends, the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, representing over 155,000 professional and undergraduate university students, submits the following recommendations for the 2013 Provincial Budget to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of Ontario’s post-secondary education system.
"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.
Graduate students need to seek out opportunities for collaboration at every stage of their graduate career. Experience working as part of a team is valuable for Ph.D. students preparing for a rapidly evolving academic job market, and it is indispensable for those pursuing careers beyond academe.