When I recently returned to my department after a decade in administration, I looked forward to reconnecting with former olleagues, getting to know the grad students, going to lectures and colloquia, teaching undergrads, and yes, even serving on departmental committees. But when I moved into my faculty office and began my work schedule, I had only one question as I looked around my department: Where did everybody go?
Future teachers are likely to teach as they were taught—which can be problematic, researchers wrote in a recent
study, "because most teachers experienced school mathematics as a set of disconnected facts and skills, not a
system of interrelated concepts."
But even when prospective teachers are taught to teach math conceptually, a good content knowledge base is still
important, the study found.
High expectations are an essential condition for student success. Simply put, no one rises to low expectations. But establishing high expectations is no simple matter. It requires more than just words, more than telling students that the community college holds high expectations for them. It also requires the establishment of policies and practices — and in turn, patterns of faculty, staff, and
student actions — that reinforce those words in everyday practice. High expectations have to be experienced, not simply heard.
Background/Context: Parental involvement is a key ingredient in the educational success of students and an integral component of involvement is teacher-parent communication. One body of research finds that minority immigrant parents face barriers in interacting with schools, and communicate less with schools than native-born White parents. However, we know little of how schools reach out to parents.
Purpose: In this study, I use a nationally representative sample of high schoolers to examine patterns of teachers communicating with parents.
Doctoral supervisors are often said to “go the extra mile” for their students, but few academics will do this literally.
Sarahjane Jones, research fellow at Birmingham City University’s Centre for Health and Social Care Research, is, however, one academic who can actually make that claim.
While most scholars confine one-on-one tutorials to their office, Jones prefers to take her PhD charges on a walk along Birmingham’s canal towpaths to discuss their research, covering three to four miles in a typical “walking supervision”.
Are your students stressed out, tired, and unable to focus? They’re not alone. The average eighth-grade student now spends over 25 hours a year taking standardized tests, while the average high school student reports feeling stressed 80 percent of the time.
Even kindergartners are feeling more academic pressure, spending less time on art and music and more on math, reading, and assessment compared with the late 1990s. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, childhood stress can lead to permanent changes in brain structure and function, increasing the likelihood of learning difficulties, memory problems, and chronic diseases in adult life. Meanwhile, a 2013 report by the American
Psychological Association (APA) found that the negative effects of stress persist into the high school years: 35 percent of teens lie awake at night because of stress, cutting into critical sleep time and increasing the likelihood that they’ll have concentration problems or experience feelings of sadness and depression.
Prior knowledge is essential for learning because it helps us make sense of new ideas and information. But when that prior knowledge is incomplete, confused, or flawed, it can create barriers to learning. Consider the following scenarios.
The provincial government is ordering colleges to pull back on proposed salary hikes that would see senior executives get raises as high as 50 per cent, following a five-year pay freeze.
Advanced Education Minister Deb Matthews said the proposed raises are based on unfair comparisons, and equate running a college to running larger, more complex organizations.
A fifth of Canadian postsecondary students are depressed and anxious or battling other mental health issues, according to a new national survey of colleges and universities that finds more students are reporting being in distress than three years ago.
Reports of serious mental health crises such as depression and thoughts about suicide also rose.
In Prime Minister Trudeau’s mandate letter to the Ministry of Canadian Heritage, copyright policy received not a single mention. The mandate letter, which sets out the ministry’s main agenda, contains extensive directives to establish programs and artists’ subsidies, but none to the fundamental rights on which the arts rely.
Yet, as demonstrated by the ministerial briefing book (prepared to inform incoming ministers of active issues in their
portfolios), many important copyright issues are outstanding, including implementation of treaties, Internet piracy, the
2017 review of the Copyright Act, extending the term of protection for copyright-protected works, and the efficiency of
copyright collectives. Perhaps most urgent, and instructive, is another issue mentioned in the briefing book:
copyright clearance by educational institutions. In this case, bad law is destroying an entire industry.
Teaching is a critical and extensive part of academic life, yet pedagogical training for academics is still rare (Britnell et al., 2010; Evers et al., 2009). Inadequate pedagogical education for academics has multiple negative effects: for the university, it can necessitate expensive remedial action; for individual academics, it negatively affects job satisfaction and, in rare cases, achievement of tenure; and for students, most importantly, it impedes their learning (Nyquist, Abbott, Wulff & Sprague, 1991). Nevertheless, although formal educational development programs for faculty members and graduate students have multiplied in the last 40 years across the English-speaking world, they are still not the norm in North America. When surveyed, more than half of faculty members report a desire for help with teaching and learning issues from their local teaching and learning centres
(Britnell et al., 2010; Evers et al., 2009). Well-planned, intensive, long-term education and training programs are most beneficial, though even a small amount of training can make a difference by improving student perceptions of teaching quality (Dimitrov et al., 2013; Dalgaard,1982; Bray & Howard, 1980).
I recently overheard a faculty member talking about students, and it wasn’t good. She sounded very much like a conference presenter whom Melanie Cooper describes in a Journal of Chemical Education editorial. The presenter’s talk had a strong “students these days” undercurrent.
Sometimes we do need to vent. It isn’t easy teaching students who don’t come to class prepared, seem to always want the easiest way, are prepared to cheat if necessary, don’t have good study skills, and aren’t interested in learning what we love to teach. Venting, especially to a trusted colleague, helps us put things in perspective. At some point, though, venting morphs into
complaining, and what we say about students becomes what we think about them. And that's when it starts getting dangerous, because it affects how we teach.
Presidential terminations and resignations are nothing new, even in the staid world of academia. Yet, rarely have they played out in so public a manner as the abrupt departure of president Arvind Gupta at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2015 or the messy dismissal of Ilene Busch-Vishniac as president of the University of Saskatchewan a year earlier. Quebec had its own drama in May 2015, with the resignation of Nadia Ghazzali, rector at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, following a critical report by Quebec’s auditor general. All three leaders left before completing their first mandates.
Amidst the turmoil, Peter Stoicheff was named the 11th president of U of S, a position he took up in late October 2015. A former English professor and a classical guitar composer with two recordings to his name, Dr. Stoicheff had served as dean of the college of arts and science at U of S for four years and knew the internal workings of the institution and its culture well. But there was a lot he didn’t know, he readily admits, and that weighed on him.
Inside Higher Ed’s eighth annual survey of college and university presidents seeks to understand how these leaders view the opportunities and challenges facing higher education institutions in the U.S.
This study addresses the following questions:
• What effects do presidents perceive the election of Donald Trump had on their campus and on higher education more generally?
• What are presidents’ views of some of the federal policies that affect higher education?
• Are presidents confident in the sustainability of their institution’s financial model over the next 5 and 10 years?
• Do presidents believe the business models used in various sectors of higher education are sustainable?
• Do presidents anticipate that additional colleges will close or merge in the coming year?
• What are presidents’ opinions about tuition resets or tuition freezes?
• What are presidents’ biggest concerns about the size and composition of their student body?
• How do presidents assess race relations at their institution and at colleges nationwide?
• Do college presidents believe that Americans have an accurate view of the purposes of higher education?
• What factors do presidents see as causing declines in public support for higher education?
• How vocal have presidents been about political matters?
• How well prepared do presidents think they were for the various tasks of a college presidency when they first became a president?
To write well, college students need to read to deepen their understanding of language. And they need to write. The 24 essays in this collection will prompt teachers to help their students grasp changes in what is acceptable language, explore the mysteries
of word usage, and learn strategies to improve their writing. The essays are drawn from Lingua Franca, The Chronicle’s free blog about language in academe. Students can read these posts and new ones at chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca.
Kennett, Mo.
Drive 90 miles north on Interstate 55 from Memphis, then 20 miles west on Route 412, cutting through seemingly endless fields of cotton, rice, and soybeans. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you see the sign: Welcome to Kennett. Hometown of Sheryl Crow.
This small town in southeastern Missouri used to greet visitors with a different motto: "Service. Industry. Agriculture." But the machine-parts-maker closed and the trailer manufacturer left and the aluminum smelter went under. There’s not nearly as much industry around here as there used to be. Sheryl Crow’s Grammys aren’t going anywhere.
The career search is a mysterious process, and as the seeker it is easy to feel as if you have no control. And the longer the search goes on without a positive outcome, the more you can feel like the system is rigged against you.
But having been on both sides of the hiring equation myself, and through my work coaching others through the process, I know that sometimes job candidates sabotage their own success. My point is not to cast blame, but to provide you with some insight into the perspective of the hiring manager so you can evaluate and reassess your approach. Following are some areas to consider when analyzing your process.
This fall, I will be one of three lecturers teaching my department’s professional development course, where we help new graduate-student instructors learn the ropes, concurrently as they teach rhetoric for the first time. Many of them have never been in front of a college classroom. So I've been thinking a lot this summer about what they’ll be facing and how I might help prepare them.
Adoption of the learning management system can affect areas of higher education such as student engagement, classroom anagement, and online courses. Likewise, lack of adoption can impede the success of using the tools available to higher education. This whitepaper will explore Roger’s Theory of Diffusion use with adoption among faculty.
D2L believes when one faculty adopts the technology, another faculty member who might resist will soon follow. Students, in turn, will use the platform for classes and are usually not the issue when adopting technology.
The plight of Concordia professor Homa Hoodfar in Iran has once again brought up the question of what universities can do to protect scholars detained abroad.
Barely a day had passed since Alexander Sodiqov had been jailed in Central Asia and his colleague Edward Schatz was already mulling a public campaign to bring Mr. Sodiqov home. “Right away, one of the things we wanted to do was start a petition,” said Dr. Schatz, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Mr. Sodiqov, a doctoral student working with Dr. Schatz, was detained in Tajikistan for nearly three months in 2014.