I arrived at my Monday-evening seminar 10 minutes early to set up, get my bearings, and chat a little with the students before class started. While I was fiddling around on my laptop, a student spoke up from the middle of the room: "Professor Lang, I couldn’t see the feedback you gave us on our last papers."
Two years ago, I began grading papers via my college’s learning-management system (LMS, for short). I had evaluated the first round of papers in my senior seminar the previous week. Yet according to this student, while she could see her grade, she couldn’t read either my comments on the paper or my end note, in which I give instructions on how students might improve their next papers.
Teaching tool or distraction? One of the most vexing issues for faculty today is what to do about cell phones in the classroom. According to a study conducted by Dr. Jim Roberts, a marketing professor at Baylor University, college students spend between eight to ten hours daily on their cell phones. Regardless of whatever “no cell phone” policies we attempt to enforce in our classrooms, many of our students are sneakily checking Instagram or texting friends when they’re supposed to be engaged in solving matrices or analyzing Shakespeare.
Academe’s Me Too movement has thus far focused on professors harassing students, or senior professors harassing junior professors. And that makes sense, given the obvious power differential between those groups: in many cases, students depend on faculty members for not only grades but mentorship, recommendations and professional opportunities. Much the same can be said for the dynamic between junior and senior faculty members. Yet a recent case
highlights the fact that professors, too, may be vulnerable to abuse by students.
The student pulled her test tube out of the ice bucket for the 10th time, and then slumped in despair at the sight of the clear liquid.
She shoved the sample back into the ice and put her head in her hands. Nestled in the ice next to her own, her classmates’ test tubes were full of fluffy white crystals, the result of a four-hour lab on recrystallization. Clearly, at some point in the afternoon, this student had done something different from her peers, and now not a speck was visible in her test tube.
The recrystallization lab is like most of the experiments we do in my "Chemistry 3A" section: There is a single desired outcome, intended to teach a chemical concept or a laboratory technique. But of course experiments can go awry in myriad ways, as anyone who has spent any time in a laboratory knows.
In a previous article, I wrote about the challenges and rewards of chairing an academic department and offered my postchair analysis of my performance. In this essay, I talk about the skill set needed for drama-free delivery of your curriculum and reasonably happy colleagues.
We all know the saying “the devil is in the details.” It means that sometimes the success or failure of projects, careers, parties or performances hinges on some detail that was either poorly planned or neglected. Once I took an exam to be hired by a large corporation that used bubble sheets. I brought with me, as instructed, two pencils for the task. I carefully selected them, and they were freshly sharpened and gleaming. If only I had thought to check whether they were No. 2 pencils. The proctors for the exam, who were also human resources executives, gave me that tsk-tsk look as they handed me the stubby in-house pencils. Ultimately, the wrong leads dashed my dreams of carrying a platinum card by American Express and cruising in a European luxury automobile.
What will it take for students to succeed beyond high school? How are schools preparing students for the reality of
college-level work?
One method that has gained popularity in the United States is allowing students to take college-level courses that apply toward their high school credits and can also be transferred to colleges, if they choose to pursue postsecondary education. This is known as a dual-credit program, and it is widely used and popular in the United States.
The purpose of this commentary is to consider the role of contemplative practices in the teacher preparation curriculum. Contemplative practices help reduce stress, improve a sense of well-being, and increase coping abilities for professional demands. They can be particularly useful in managing stress in transition situations. We suggest
that students preparing to teach be provided specific training on how to use contemplative practices for sustaining positive personal and professional development.
Teens have eagerly embraced written communication with their peers as they share messages on their social network pages, in emails and instant messages online, and through fast-paced thumb choreography on their cell phones. (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008)
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?
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.
Although the literature on institutional diversity suggests that quality assurance practices could affect institutional diversity, there has been little empirical research on this relationship. This article seeks to shed some light on the possible connection between quality assurance practices and institutional diversity by examining the arrangements for quality assurance in higher education systems that include two distinct sectors, one of which having a more academic orientation and the other a more applied orientation. The article explores the ways in which quality assurance structures and standards in selected jurisdictions provide for recognition of the differences in orientation and mission between academic and applied sectors of higher education systems. The research identified some features of quality assurance systems that recognize the characteristics of applied higher
education, such as having different statements of expected learning outcomes for applied and academic programs or requiring different qualifications for faculty who teach in applied programs. It is hoped that the results might be of interest to policy makers and quality assurance practitioners who are concerned about the possible impact of quality assurance on institutional diversity.
Technology has changed just about every facet of our economy and society — from how we travel to how we bank to how we communicate with each other. But perhaps no part of the economy has been as fundamentally transformed as our nation’s workforce.
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 Liberal government is moving to make it easier for international students to become permanent residents once
they have graduated from Canadian postsecondary institutions.
Immigration Minister John McCallum said he intends to launch federal-provincial talks to reform the current Express Entry program, a computerized system that serves as a matchmaking service between employers and foreign skilled workers. Thousands of international students have been rejected for permanent residency because the program favours prospective skilled workers from abroad.
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
Keywords Schools, Leadership, Development, Educational philosophy, Integration
Abstract This paper looks at the central role of school leadership for developing and assuring the quality of schools, as corroborated by findings of school effectiveness research and school improvement approaches. Then, it focuses on the growing importance placed on activities to prepare school leaders due to the ever-increasing responsibilities they are facing. In many countries, this has led to the design and implementation of extensive programs. In this paper, international trends in school leader development are identified. As regards the aims of the programs, it becomes obvious that they are increasingly grounded on a more broadly defined understanding of leadership, adjusted to the core purpose of school, and based on educational beliefs integrating the values of a democratic society.
Many colleges speak of the importance of increasing student retention. Indeed, quite a few invest substantial resources in programs designed to achieve that end. Some institutions even hire consultants who promise a proven formula for successful retention. But for all that effort, most institutions do not take student retention seriously. They treat student retention, like so many other issues, as one more item to add to the list of issues to be addressed by the institution. They adopt what Parker calls the "add a course" strategy in addressing the issues that face them. Need to address the issue of diversity? Add a course in diversity studies. Need to address the issue of student retention, in particular that of new students?Add a freshman seminar or perhaps a freshmen mentoring program. The result is that student experiences are increasingly segmented into smaller and smaller pieces; their relationships with faculty, staff, and each other becoming more narrow and specialized; their learning further partitioned into smaller disconnected segments.
When Canada was created in 1867, the churches were already operating a small num-ber of boarding schools for Aboriginal people. In the coming years, Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries established missions and small boarding schools throughout the West. The relationship between the government and the churches was formalized in 1883 when the federal government decided to establish three large residential schools in west-ern Canada.
The University of Ottawa will put in new training programs for administration, students and full-time coaches, launch a bystander intervention program and fund new courses on rape culture after the release today of a task force report into sexual violence.
The task force on respect and equality’s report, which school president Allan Rock said he received Thursday morning, gives 11 recommendations after nine months of work.
Ken Coates is a Munk Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and co-author of What to Consider If
You’re Considering University. Douglas Auld is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph.
As students at colleges and universities across the country head back to class, the nation’s media have been filled with familiar debates about tuition fees, student debt, careers and government funding. As the debate goes on, universities, colleges and polytechnical institutes will defend their work, governments will laud the contributions of postsecondary institutes to Canada’s so-called innovation agenda, and student organizations will demand lower fees. This is all predictable, producing more heat than light in the process.