Midterm evaluations bring a host of institutional measures to reach out to underachieving students. However, what might make the most difference to students’ success in their courses is to enable them to assess their own performance and set goals as well as to ask questions of and provide feedback to the instructor. Instructors can give students this reflective opportunity through an online journal assignment in which students do the following:
Report their overall grade in the course
Report their attendance record (when attendance is required) Reflect on their performance, whether
it meets their expectations
Provide goals for the rest of the course (often in the form of a GPA, but can also be learning outcomes)
Provide feedback and ask questions
Essential ingredients to gaining buy-in. The obstacles? Where does accountability for student retention rest?
When I visit with teachers employed in public schools, I often hear, “You are already where I want to be. College. That’s where we all want to be.”
Many public school teachers consider pursuing master’s degrees with the goal of someday teaching college. Unfortunately, many of them are under misconceptions. More than once, someone has applied for a position at Howard College who was not aware of certain realities. For those who have considered teaching at a community college, here are a few things of which to be aware.
“Increased domestic and global access to higher education,” writes Amy Lee in her 2017 book Teaching Interculturally: A Framework for Integrating Disciplinary Knowledge and Intercultural Development, has resulted in having “multiple diversities in any given classroom or academic program.”
Audio, visual, textual—most people are willing and eager to identify themselves as a certain type of learner. And it follows pretty quickly that they learn better and faster when teachers approach a lesson in their “style.” Based on that logic, many school districts have poured money into training and materials to help teachers tailor their lessons to the various learning styles of their students. But haste makes waste, write Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego; Mark McDaniel of Washing-ton University, St. Louis; Doug Rohrer of the University of South Florida; and Robert A. Bjork of the University of California, Los Ange-les. There just isn’t sufficient evidence to support customizing education in this way.
In preparing students for employment in commerce, the student needs to be aware of many aspects not necessarily included in business programs. In recognizing students often have no or limited exposure to foreign envi- ronments, the authors developed an electronic exchange between students in Canada and Kazakhstan. In this exchange, students not only learned about foreign marketplaces but were able to integrate classroom teachings and text knowledge into their actions. This approach
resulted in enhanced learning for students through double-loop porcesses and development in their other courses.
Canada needs skills of all kinds to remain competitive in the global economy. Today’s students are the workforce of tomorrow, and their education will shape Canada’s future prosperity. Graduates across all disciplines are reaping the rewards of a university education. They’re armed with the hands-on learning experience, entrepreneurial spirit and interdisciplinary skills that will help them succeed in an evolving labour market.
Universities offer innovative and diverse learning experiences that equip students to adapt, collaborate, lead and learn throughout their lives, and they can do even more with the partnership and commitment of the government and private sector.
Much of our work as educators consists of designing and delivering experiences in which students can develop their understanding and application of concepts and skills in our disciplines. Given that we have only 16 weeks with our students, we need various ways for deepening and expanding these formative experiences in our field. Visiting experts can be a wonderful way of developing expertise, and leveraging online tools like Skype and Zoom can open up powerful possibilities for new collaboration and conversation.
We often hear that peer review is an excellent opportunity for reciprocal student learning. In theory, this makes sense. Since an instructor can only dedicate a certain amount of attention to each student, peer review allows students to receive more feedback and engage more frequently in the content they are learning. Research shows this benefits both the students who receive and provide feedback.
Putting Students In Charge of Their Learning
Through inquiry, Wildwood works to ignite passion, inspire relevance, and develop ownership in their students. Using student inquiries and questions as guidance, teachers develop lessons that engage and excite, teaching their students to be active thinkers rather than passive learners.
Purpose: Our study uses Remillard’s framework for characterizing and studying teachers’ interactions with curriculum materials specifically in the context of GBL. We believe that exploring the dynamic relationship between teachers and a GBL curriculum may help those involved in supporting teachers in implementing GBL to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of the teacher/GBL curriculum relationship. This research examined teachers' GBL implementation experiences in order to answer the following research question: How do we describe and characterize teachers’ interactions with GBL curriculum materials?
The Government of Ontario’s Reaching Higher plan was a visionary document that provided needed funding to Ontario’s postsecondary system. However, it was not sufficient to overcome the long history of university under-funding in our province. Its impact was also eroded by unanticipated increases in enrolment and the current economic downturn.
Introductory courses can open doors for students, helping them not only discover a love for a subject area that can blossom into their major but also feel more connected to their campus. But on many campuses, teaching introductory courses typically falls to less-experienced instructors. Sometimes the task is assigned to instructors whose very connection to the college is tenuous. A growing body of evidence suggests that this tension could have negative consequences for students.
Losing a faculty member always hurts, but many administrators believe they have little control over whether professors move on. A new effort seeks to provide meaningful data.
Young Ontarians are more concerned than older people about the impact of teaching by parttime university professors, according to a poll released Wednesday by the province’s faculty association.
Seventy-one per cent of people between 15 and 17 said they want to see a permanent instructor at the front of the class, compared with 64 per cent of all Ontarians, a result that the group that commissioned the survey says shows support for measures that would improve the working conditions of part-time faculty.
colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t allow women.
On Wednesday, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi said decisions on the operation of a
campus, including student composition, are up to each college’s board of governors.
But late Thursday, after a lot of criticism on social media about the male-only campuses, the minister had a
change of heart about Ontario colleges teaching courses that deliberately exclude women.
We live in challenging times. Ours is an era in which evidence, intellectual inquiry and expertise are under sustained attack. The phrases ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ have slipped into common use. Agendas have displaced analysis in much of our public debate. And we are all the poorer for it.
In Australia and around the world, we’ve seen the emergence of a creeping cynicism – even outright hostility – towards evidence and expertise. We saw this sentiment in the post-Brexit declaration by British Conservative MP Michael Gove that “the people of this country have had enough of experts”.
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.
Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation, by William Ayers, is a recent addition to the Teachers College ress
Teaching for Social Justice series for which Ayers is an editor. The author takes readers on a philosophical, existential, and practical journey (a motif used throughout) to explore the nature of public education in the U.S. as it presently is and as he believes it ought to be in a democratic society. Although Ayers is a distinguished scholar of education, this is not a typical academic book. Arguments are not disguised in theory and references to scholars are reserved for those of significant stature
such as John Dewey, Maxine Greene, and Paulo Freire. The language used within the book is informally punctuated with
colloquialisms and slang such as pinheaded, queeroes, ginormous, and bits and pieces. Consequently, Ayers achieves broad appeal for those inside and outside of the academy.
Mention the “classroom of the future” and it might evoke images of an old Jetsons cartoon—Elroy and his fellow students working on tablets, following a lecture by a virtual teacher and collaborating on space-aged technology.
While there is little doubt that classrooms have become more sophisticated and digital; the physical classroom setting and furniture haven’t evolved at nearly the same pace. The tablets that are transforming the learning process still sit on top of the same style desks from the 1950s. The blackboards and chalk may have been replaced by interactive whiteboards connected to a computer or projector, but far too often, students still sit in stagnant rows looking up in the same direction at the teacher for the daily lesson.