In order for teacher education programs to act as significant scaffolds in supporting new teachers to become informed, creative and innovative members of a highly complex and valuable profession, we need to re-‐‑imagine ways in which teacher education programs operate. We need to re-‐‑imagine how courses are conceptualized and connected, how learning is shared and how knowledge, not just “professional”, but embedded knowledge in authentic contexts of teaching and
learning is understood, shaped and re-‐‑applied. Drawing on our collective case study of instructors’ lived experience of a locally developed program in secondary teacher education called Transformative University of Victoria (TRUVIC), we offer a relational approach to knowing as an alternative to more mechanistic explanations that limit teacher growth and
development. To ground our interpretation, we draw on complexity as a theory of change and emergence that supports learning as distributed, relational, adaptive and emerging.
Ontario universities are integral to the health and social development of the province, says a new report that positions postsecondary institutions as an important element in the upcoming provincial election.
Governments, employers and universities must partner to ensure the province has a strong talent and research pipeline, says the report that is being released Tuesday morning. It commits postsecondary institutions to working more closely with employers and asks the province for sustained funding to ensure small and medium-sized companies can offer experiential training.
This paper analyzes the incentives induced by a formula to fund universities based primarily on enrolment. Using a simple
game theoretical framework, we argue that the strategic behaviour induced by those formulas is to favour enrollment. We
further argue that if the funding value differs by enrolment type, it introduces incentives to substitute enrolment where most
profitable. If the public appropriations do not follow the outcomes induced by the formula, the incentives introduce a dynamic
inconsistency, and funding per student can decline. We use these results to discuss the 2018 funding formula changes in Québec.
We argue that Québec’s latest reform should reduce substitution effects and increase graduate enrolment. We provide
simulations of the reform’s redistributive effects and show that some universities gain structural advantages over others. Whilst
the reform, on a short-term basis, deploys a mechanism to mitigate these advantages, on a long-term basis the effect introduces
a larger gap between Québec higher-education institutions.
Keywords: university funding, reforms, simulation, induced effects, post-secondary education, game theory
Political pollsters like to talk about the distinction between "hard support" and "soft support." Hard supporters will vote for a candidate no matter what. Soft supporters are known by another name: swing voters. They are the people who say they’ll vote for a certain candidate but often change their minds.
The idea of training Ph.D.s for diverse career tracks has hard and soft supporters, too, but some professors may not realize which group they’re in. They may believe they’re behind graduates who search for jobs beyond the professoriate. But the actions of these faculty members — or their inaction — can suggest otherwise.
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.
Governments are increasingly looking to international comparisons of education opportunities and outcomes as they develop policies to enhance individuals’ social and economic prospects, provide incentives for greater efficiency in schooling, and help to mobilise resources to meet rising demands. The OECD Directorate for Education and Skills contributes to these efforts by developing and analysing the quantitative, internationally comparable indicators that it publishes annually in Education at a Glance. Together with OECD country policy reviews, these indicators can be used to assist governments in building more effective and equitable education systems. Education at a Glance addresses the needs of a range of users, from governments seeking to learn policy lessons to academics requiring data for further analysis to the general public wanting to monitor how its country’s schools are progressing in producing world-class students. The publication examines the quality of learning outcomes, the policy levers and contextual factors that shape these outcomes, and the broader private and social returns that accrue to investments in education.
We are often warned against being judgemental. “Judge not, lest ye be judged”, for example, reminds us how vulnerable we are to others’ estimations of us, and how likely those estimations are to be biased.
Nevertheless, we continue to make judgements, both positive and negative, because we have evolved to do so. Human brains have been “domesticated” by our need to live in groups to survive. We assess others carefully, and monitor their views of us; if those views are negative, we may be cast out of the group.
Ontario's provincial government recognizes college to university transfer as increasingly important. The challenge that Ontario faces is that its college and university systems were created as binary structures, with insufficient credit transfer opportunities for college students who wish to access universities with appropriate advanced standing. This paper discusses Fanshawe College's consequent attempt to create new pathways for its students within the European Higher Education Area, whose Bologna Process provides an integrated credit transfer system that is theoretically very open to student mobility. This unique project is intended to act as an exemplar for other Ontario colleges seeking similar solutions, and to support an articulation agreement between Fanshawe's Advanced Diploma in Architectural Technology and a Building Sciences Master's program at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Around 9 p.m. on Friday, I opened my kitchen door to chants and flickering lights. After telling my kids to stay inside,
I scrambled over a stone wall and down a brick stairwell to find torch-bearing men and women clad in white polo
shirts and khakis, chanting "You will not replace us" and "Anti-Black." They marched in cadence, two by two, as far
as I could see.
Collaboration helps to develop many of the key skills that will be required of students for their future success. Students can develop many of these so-called “soft skills,” or Essential Employability Skills, by engaging in group work and other forms of collaboration (Ontario Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development 2005). Collaboration leads to greater retention, improved student achievement, and increased self-esteem and metacognition, and it can be used to facilitate active learning and to promote inclusion by increasing contact among diverse groups (Bossert 1988; Bowman, Frame, and Kennette 2013; Hennessey 1999; Kennette and Frank 2010; Kramarski and Mevarech 2003; Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin 2007; U.S. Department of Education 1992). Despite the many benefits of group work, instructors are sometimes hesitant to use it due to some of its well-known pitfalls
(social loafing, disputes, individualized grading, student bemoaning, etc.).
Sometimes I watch my students in the hallways before class starts and marvel at the computing power (they call them 'smartphones') they hold in their hands. They use this power to text and share pictures and thoughts on social media. Then they stuff all that power in their pockets. In my small, private school, we have an "off and away" policy for cellphones in the classroom, which is supposed to eliminate the distractions. But it is not a perfect system, and students are still tempted to use their phones.
Perhaps you've had thoughts like mine: How can I get those supercomputers to work for their learning instead of being a nuisance? Why should I make them hide their mobile devices or fear they will get in trouble for using them? I'm just not satisfied with "off and away"! These questions have grown into a desire to find new ways to leverage my students’ mobile devices into learning tools.
Canada needs to take an integrated and innovative approach to enhancing student mobility, according to participants at a workshop held December 2014 by Universities Canada. The workshop – held in Calgary and attracting university and private sector leaders – called for Canada to step up its efforts to get university students moving beyond their province and beyond our borders.
The scholarly literature on “active learning” is almost shockingly positive. Over and over again, when active-learning
strategies have been studied — particularly when they have been compared to lecturing — they have been found to
increase student learning.
A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 studies measured student performance in STEM courses taught by traditional lectures against courses that used active-learning strategies. Using a cautious methodology to avoid biases, the study found a marked difference between the two categories. Average marks in the active-learning courses were a half-grade higher (i.e., a B rather than a B-) compared with those taught by lecture. Moreover, students in lecture courses were one and a half times more likely to fail than their counterparts who engaged in active learning. Considering how many studies were looked at, those were remarkably consistent results.
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.
Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design studentcentered
learning experiences.
The Ontario government said Monday it allowed two provincial colleges to create male-only campuses in Saudi Arabia, but added that gap in the approval process will be closed.
Reza Moridi, minister of colleges and universities, said that Niagara and Algonquin Colleges applied to his ministry to establish the two Saudi campuses, and were given the green light by a previous minister in 2008 and 2012.
However, Moridi said the province’s responsibility was to approve financial plans for the two Saudi
expansions and it was up to the colleges to determine who was admitted.
Research is reviewed in a rigorous manner, by expert peers. Yet teaching is often reviewed only or mostly by pedagogical non-experts: students. There’s also mounting evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs -- against female and minority instructors in particular. And teacher ratings aren’t necessarily correlated with learning outcomes.
In this study, the authors examined the findings and implications of the research on trust in leadership that has been conducted during the past 4 decades. First, the study provides estimates of the primary relationships between trust in leadership and key outcomes, antecedents, and correlates (k 106). Second, the study explores how specifying the construct with alternative leadership referents (direct leaders vs. organizational leadership) and definitions (types of trust) results in systematically different relationships between trust in leadership and outcomes and antecedents. Direct leaders (e.g., supervisors) appear to be a particularly important referent of trust. Last, a theoretical framework is offered to provide parsimony to the expansive literature and to clarify the different perspectives on the construct of trust in leadership and its operation.
In Canada, the term “visible minority” is used to define one of four designated groups under the Employment Equity Act. The purpose of the act is to achieve workplace equality and to correct employment disadvantages affecting women, Aboriginal peoples, people with disabilities, and visible minorities. Within this context, visible minorities are defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.”
This quantitative study examined the relationship between the Big 5 personality traits and how they relate to online teacher effectiveness. The primary method of data collection for this study was through the use of surveys primarily building upon the Personality Style Inventory (PSI)(Lounsbury & Gibson, 2010), a work-based personality measure, was the instrument used to assess personality measures. In addition an evaluation instrument was developed by the researchers to evaluate classroom performance across a 10-point scale. In total 115 instructors from a large predominantly online university were surveyed through Qualtrics for personality traits and then had their courses evaluated for effectiveness and quality utilizing measures based on the Quality Matters program. Using a Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, it was found that 9 personality traits were significantly correlated with online teaching performance. While the results of this study can only be seen at this point as preliminary, it does open the door to further studies to determine if online teacher training or professional development interventions should take a different approach. Ultimately, the findings of this study demonstrated that personality does play a significant role in the effectiveness of online teaching performance.