Students in residence at the University of Guelph shouldn't be surprised if the president of the school knocks on their door starting Monday.
That's because president Franco Vaccarino along with other administrators, faculty members and counsellors will be making house calls to check on the mental well-being of students.
The Strategic Mandate Agreement (SMA) exercise was intended to address at least three desired
outcomes:
1. To promote the government’s stated goal1 of increasing the differentiation of the Ontario
postsecondary system by asking each Ontario postsecondary institution to articulate an
institutional mandate statement identifying its distinctive strengths or aspirations and to
identify key objectives aligned with that aspiration.
2. To advance and inform the discussion about how the Ontario system could increase its
productivity to deliver a quality education to more students within the financial constraints
expected in the public sector.2
3. To elicit the best thinking from institutions about innovations and reforms that would support
higher quality learning and, in its most ambitious form, transform Ontario’s public
postsecondary system.
Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early-career workers in the United States. Analysis of the new PIAAC survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 22 countries shows that the focus on early-career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 percent wage increase among prime-age workers. But this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. Eight countries, including all Nordic countries, have returns between 12 and 15 percent, while six are above 21 percent with the largest return being 28 percent in the United States. Estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures, additional controls, and various subgroups. Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.
Résumé
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.
Inside Higher Ed’s fifth annual survey of college and university provosts and chief academic officers (CAOs) aims to understand how these leaders perceive and address the challenges facing higher education institutions in the U.S.
With a shift towards performance-based funding for public institutions and growing competition across all of higher education, demonstrating on-time completion and positive student outcomes is a major challenge facing today’s colleges and universities. Modern students and their families are expecting institutions to provide the tools and support to ensure students secure the necessary skills and competencies to prepare them for a successful life.
Institutions across the country are seeing students arrive on campus not academically prepared for college-level coursework. In fact, nearly 60% of students need remediation1. Students often take courses that not related to their degree program. Or, they are unsure about which degree program is even best for their interests and skills. Consequently, over 40% of students who begin college never graduate.
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.
The decade since 2004 has brought profound reexamination of the role and results of developmental programs in community and technical colleges around the country. Pushed by the emerging student success and completion agenda, colleges have dealt with intense scrutiny and a demand for the redesign of these programs.
Context: There is growing interest in the integration of meditation in higher education.
Purpose: Here, we review evidence bearing on the utility of meditation to facilitate the achievement of traditional educational goals and to enhance education of the “whole person.”
Research Design: We examine how meditation practices may help foster important cognitive skills of attention and information processing, as well build stress resilience and adaptive interpersonal capacities through a review of the published research literature.
Conclusions/Recommendations: We offer directions for future research, highlighting the importance of theory-based investigations, increased methodological rigor, expansion of the scope of education-related outcomes studied, and the study of best practices for teaching meditation in educational settings.
Understanding sexual assault.
While more information than ever is available about autism, there are still prevalent stereotypes: The “Rain Man” stereotype of the severely impacted person with savant skills, and the less severely impacted “Bill Gates” stereotype, a scientifically or mathematically brilliant person with limited social skills.
Stereotypes, by definition, are oversimplifications, which means that many layers and nuances are frequently missed.
Women are much less likely to be reappointed as faculty deans than men, says a new study of hiring at Canadian
universities.
While recruitment of new deans at Canadian universities largely reflects the overall gender balance of its academic sector, a University of Toronto researcher has found that women were far less likely to be reappointed once their five-year office had concluded.
Analysing almost 300 appointment and reappointment announcements from the Canadian publication University Affairs between 2011 and 2016, Eric Lavigne, a PhD student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, found that 58 per cent of appointments for dean positions went to men and 42 per cent were awarded to women.
The landscape of higher education has significantly changed. Methods of instructional delivery, student profiles and degree offerings have transformed traditional brick and mortar institutions. Distance educational courses and programs, either fully online or hybrid, have been a major contributing factor in this shift. While a high percentage of students take classes online, adult learners particularly benefit from the flexibility and accessibility offered by online education. Yet, adult learners are more likely to be intimidated because of their lack of familiarity with this new learning paradigm. This article examines online and adult learners programming as well as strategies to address their needs, and presents the results of an evaluation that examined the effectiveness of an Online Adult Learner-Focused Program. The program was developed at a small public college in the southeast area of the United States and consisted of 97 respondents. The results of the study found various levels of student satisfaction with online adult the objectives of the program. Implications and recommendations for instructors, program coordinators and administrators are also discussed.
It happens nearly every semester: I get a paper so bad I don't know how to grade it. I'm not talking about a late paper, or one that's been plagiarized, or is too short or off topic. No, I’m referring to a species of essay that checks all of the superficial boxes but is so poorly written, so shoddily done, that it seems to demand a special response.
It’s actually hard for students to get a bad grade on a piece of writing in my courses. I do in-class workshops on topic choice, thesis construction, rough drafts, and revision. Students have many opportunities to find out that their essay is on the wrong track, and fix the problem. It’s almost impossible for them to leave the writing to the last minute. But there's always one ...
Americans are obsessed with narcissistic leaders, or at least they have an ambivalence between the ones they like and the ones they promote. A case in point is Real Estate baron and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Not that he is alone. At various times, similar attention and popularity have been heaped by the public and especially by the media for leaders such as Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca and Larry Ellison.
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.
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.
The letter is typical of those liberal arts colleges send to high school students who have done well on the PSAT.
"Which of the following would you expect to find at one of the best liberal colleges?" asks the letter, from Macalester College. It goes on to list qualities of which the college can boast: "academic challenge," "a global perspective," "1,257 miles of hiking trails," "active, politically aware students," "small classes and 10:1 student-faculty ratio." Mixed into the list are some qualities at Macalester than you won't find everywhere else. For example, bagpipes makes the
list, as the college's Scottish heritage is evident in the tradition of using the instrument to announce that a professor has earned tenure.
It's been more than seven months since Justin Trudeau pledged to develop an Indigenous Languages Act, and a Sudbury professor is hoping that the government eventually develops a preservation plan with "teeth."
Mary Anne Corbiere of the University of Sudbury said that some languages are on the brink of being lost.
"If they are not preserved, they will die when the last speaker dies," Corbiere told CBC's Morning North. "Some languages in Canada now just have fewer than 10 speakers who grew up with the language. Most of those speakers are elderly."
Abstract
Various studies acknowledge the uncertainty many doctoral graduates face when beginning their search for full-time employment within the academic sector. Recent graduates face a job market where the likelihood of obtaining full-time permanent positions in academia is perceived to be declining, and the mobility of graduates within the sector is unclear. Drawing on Statistics Canada’s 2013 National Graduates Survey, this paper assesses whether graduates who pursued a doctoral degree to become a full-time professor achieved their goal within three years of graduation. The results suggest that although a large portion of doctoral graduates pursued their degrees to become full-time professors, relatively few reported obtaining such positions within three years of graduation, regardless of field of study.
Résumé
Plusieurs études attestent de l’incertitude que doivent affronter les titulaires d’un doctorat quand ils entament leurs recherches pour un poste à temps plein dans le secteur universitaire. En effet, les récents diplômés font face à un marché de l’emploi où on plein dans le secteur académique s’amenuisent, et où la mobilité professionnelle des titulaires d’un doctorat de ce secteur demeure floue. À partir des données de l’Enquête nationale auprès des diplômés 2013 de Statistique Canada, cet article examine la propension des titulaires d’un doctorat souhaitant devenir professeurs à temps plein à réaliser leur objectif sur une période de trois ans après leur collation des grades. Indépendamment du domaine d’étude, les résultats démontrent que, bien qu’une grande proportion de titulaires d’un doctorat aspire à devenir professeurs à temps plein, peu d’entre eux rapportent avoir obtenu de tels postes trois ans après leur remise de diplôme. perçoit que les chances d’obtenir un poste permanent à temps