There hasn’t been a lot written recently about test anxiety, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer an issue for a significant number of students. Those of us who don’t suffer from test anxiety—and I’m betting that’s most faculty— can find it hard to be sympathetic. Life is full of tests, and students need to get over it. Besides, if students have studied and prepared, there’s no reason for them to feel excessively anxious about a test.
Professional capital has a fundamental con-nection to transforming teaching every day, and we’ve seen many examples of this at work in schools and school systems around the world. Here, we explore the powerful idea of capital and articulate its importance for professional work, professional capacity, and professional effectiveness. Systems that invest in professional capital recognize that education spending is an investment in developing human capital from early childhood to adulthood, leading to rewards of economic productivity and social cohesion in the next gen-eration (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012).
Professional capital requires attention not only to po-litical and societal investments in education but also to leadership actions and educator needs, contributions, and career stages.
Life is filled with opportunities that either come along or are created. Regardless of how an opportunity is presented, it is important to make the best of the situation. I have the great fortune to serve in my second year as the president of Lone Star College-North Harris. LSC-North Harris is located in Houston, Texas, one of the six colleges that make up Lone Star College. I believe that serving as president of the college is a great opportunity, coupled with tremendous responsibilities. The college has a great history and was the original college of Lone Star College. Prior to his current role, Lone Star College’s chancellor, Dr. Stephen C. Head, was the president of LSC-North Harris.
At a special reception Tuesday night to mark the unveiling of the Queen’s Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Task Force final report and recommendations, Principal Daniel Woolf told the crowd of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and local Indigenous community members that, “Today, our communities come together to change course.”
“By taking steps to ensure that Indigenous histories are shared, by recognizing that we can all benefit from Indigenous knowledge, and by creating culturally validating learning environments, we can begin to reduce barriers to education and create a more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse university,” said Principal Woolf.
The special event, held at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and the TRC report represent a significant milestone for Queen’s and the local Indigenous communities, signalling a broad and sustained effort to build and improve relations, and to effect meaningful institutional change. The recommendations in the report span everything from hiring practices and programming, to research, community outreach, and the creation of Indigenous cultural spaces on campus. (More detailed list of recommendations below.)
Principal Woolf reiterated his commitment to fulfilling the recommendations in the task force’s final report, and to illustrate that commitment, he announced that the university will be creating an Office of Indigenous Initiatives in the coming months – an announcement met by a loud round of applause from the audience.
Understanding sexual assault.
Despite the cash injection, campus services will not be able to meet everyone's mental health needs, Minister of
Advanced Education and Skills Development Deb Matthews said in a statement to the Toronto Star.
"Mental illness is a spectrum," Matthews said. "For some students, on-campus resources such as counselling
and/or peer support may be the best and most helpful provision of care. For students with more complex mental
health needs, the institution can serve as a point of referral or information in helping that student access the
appropriate community supports and get the help that they need."
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.
An expat explains how a temporary leave to study in the U.K. turned into a life abroad – and what the government could do to bring him back.
Growing up in small-town Ontario, I always had a nagging feeling that Canadians who moved abroad were traitors. They had shunned our country for monetary gain, or sunshine or fame. But I’ve become one of those people – part of the nation’s brain drain – and I can assure you that it was entirely accidental.
Like me, every year hundreds of Canadians head abroad to do PhDs or postdocs, intent on gathering international experience, and every year a few of them don’t come back. In my case, I was drawn to the U.K. to do a PhD in history and, two years after finishing, I am still there, now working as an academic historian. I’d like to share how that happens and what Canada might do to prevent it from happening again and again.
I did not go abroad to get a “better” education. This is what the British think draws international
students, but this is a patronizing assumption and not a reflection of reality for most. For me, the
move was part quest for adventure and
part practical desire to get my PhD completed quickly so that I could get on with a career.
The idea that a Ph.D. can prepare you for diverse careers — not just for the professoriate — is now firmly with us.
ost doctoral students in the arts and sciences start out with the desire to become professors. But that’s not where most of them end up. By now, most graduate advisers understand that their doctoral students will follow multiple career paths. And increasing numbers of professors and administrators are trying to help students do that.
The number of Ph.D.s who pursue nonfaculty careers varies by field, of course. But the reality in many disciplines is: f you’re teaching a graduate seminar with eight students in it, only two of them, on average, will become full-time faculty members. What happens to the rest? And as important, how do they feel about where they end up?
Those questions raise a different one for graduate faculty: How do we assess our efforts to train Ph.D.s for myriad careers? It’s one thing to try to help, and another to know that we are helping.
Who should we be looking at? What should we measure? And how?
As I've mentioned before, my 7-year-old daughter takes piano lessons. One of the biggest challenges has been getting her to play for herself, not for her parents. Often I'll ask her how she thought she played a song and I'll get a shrug in return. She plays, but she doesn't listen to herself play. That lack of listening, I fear, is a sign that she's just playing because we're making her.
Many of the teaching tips I've suggested in this column have been meant to encourage your students to take responsibility for their learning. For active-learning strategies to really work, I've argued, we need students to buy in completely to our courses. They need to want to learn for themselves — not for us or a grade. To accomplish that, we can invite students to take some control over the syllabus. We can turn course policies into collaborative projects, in which students have an equal say in determining important aspects of the course. We can encourage students to articulate their goals for the course, rather than just expect them to meet ours. And we can design our courses to make sure we haven't foreclosed any of those possibilities.
It’s not surprising that the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are capturing the imagination of university students. The tech sector has enjoyed a long boom — its social media platforms and digital disruptors have made mouth-watering profits, overtaken century-old companies, and revolutionized our daily lives, whether it be ride-hailing apps or disease-diagnosing smartphones. The science and engineering fields, for their part, are
pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, developing neural implants, electric vehicles and super-materials like graphene, which could help everything from water purification to spinal regeneration.
Students see in the STEM educational track the chance to solve social challenges, make money, or both. Preferential visa access for STEM graduates in many countries, including the United States, along with fears of rising automation in a growing number of professional jobs, add further gloss to technical degrees.
a b s t r a c t
This study examined the trajectories of depressive and anxious symptoms among early-career teachers (N ¼ 133) as they transitioned from their training programs into their first year of teaching. In addition, perceived school climate was explored as a moderator of these trajectories. Multilevel linear growth modeling revealed that depressive and anxious symptoms increased across the transition, and negative perceived school climate was related to more drastically increasing symptoms. Results suggest that this career stage may be a time when teachers are particularly vulnerable to declines in mental health, and speak to some within-school features that may be related to teachers’ experiences.
They should be used to inform and encourage, not to penalize.
With reference to Gerald Walton’s opinion piece, in which he declares that “academic underperformers must be called out,” I would like to suggest an alternative, more helpful approach to the problem he identifies. As dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Manitoba, from 1999 to 2004, it was my task to implement Article 35 of our collective agreement, which called for meaningful annual performance evaluations. The trick was to do that in a positive way rather than a destructive one.
School-level conditions nnd school leadership, in particular, arc key issue, in effort.'> LO change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles maner to instructional innovation, what seems mot critical is how leadership practice is undcrrnken. Yet, the practice of cbool leadership bas received limited attention in the research literature. Building on activity theory and theories of d1srribun:d cognition, this paper develops a disrrihute<l perspective on school leadership as a fromc for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice i; constituted m the mteracuon of school leaders, followers, and the situation.
As a new academic year approaches, universities across Canada are struggling to develop policies in response to the legalization of recreational cannabis. Many uncertainties remain, and while universities differ in how they plan to deal with cannabis on campus, they tend to agree on one thing: it’s complicated.
As industries evolve and demographics change, the need for education continues to grow.
We, as a global society, spend quite a bit of money on higher education – BMO Capital Markets estimates that the United States alone spends approximately US$1.7 trillion on educational services – including about US$600 million on post-secondary education – and GSV Advisors estimates that worldwide spending is quickly approaching US$5 trillion.
That’s a lot of cash. And yet, as we spend more money on education, and as universities create new degree and certificate programmes, employers are asking for graduates with different skills than the ones we teach and some students struggle to get jobs, leaving many unemployed or underemployed.
Bill C-51, the federal government’s Anti-Terrorism Act, has sparked serious concerns about the potential impact on the basic civil liberties of all Canadians. The proposed legislation would establish criminal offences that infringe upon the right to free expression. Security agencies would be granted unprecedented and intrusive powers to monitor and share information about Canadians, with no commensurate increase in oversight or accountability
Employers and higher ed institutions have acknowledged the value that this type of experience could bring to the
country’s workforce. But only 3.1% of full-time university students and 1.1% of full-time college students have studied abroad as part of their postsecondary education.
Existing research shows that Canadian students are generally interested in studying abroad, yet they face a number of obstacles. These obstacles have been categorized as the four Cs: cost, curriculum, culture, and circumstance.
The ability of postsecondary students to write and communicate proficiently is an expectation identified by many, including not only organizations such as the OECD but also other public and employer groups. There is concern, however, that students and thus employees often fail to meet expectations in these areas. To address this concern, it is necessary to understand more about the writing skills that students learn during their postsecondary education. This research project was designed to examine whether and how students are taught to write at university.
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.