Purpose/Objective: This study documents the ways in which successful, award-winning teachers function creatively in their classrooms. It investigates their beliefs about creativity in teaching—what “creativity” means, and how skilled teachers instantiate it in classroom practices. Finally, this research examined the teachers’ personal creativity (in terms of creative pursuits, hobbies, and habits of mind) and the practical ways this translates into teaching.
This is the first article in a series designed to help you create an Individual Development Plan (IDP) using myIDP, a new Web-based career-planning tool created to help graduate students and postdocs in the sciences define and pursue their career goals. To learn more about myIDP and begin the career-planning process, please visit: http://myidp.sciencecareers.org.
This paper presents preliminary findings from a pilot study whose purpose was to explore how we, a tenure-track faculty member and a doctoral student, understood and developed our teaching practice when engaged in a formal faculty–student relationship. Using a hybrid of collaborative inquiry and collaborative self-study—which included verbal and written dialogue, interrogation, as well as observation—we sought to understand how that formal faculty–student relationship promoted the development of strong teaching pedagogy. The motivation for this study was a commitment to fostering highquality teaching in undergraduate courses in our faculty of education. Driving this study was the research question: How are we investigating and improving upon our practices as teachers in post-secondary education?
Student requests for academic accommodations are increasing across university campuses, and Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, believes students are taking advantage of available accommodations, such as extra time on exams, to get ahead of their peers.
Pardy argues against providing accommodation with this analogy: that if Andre De Grasse asked for a 20-metre head start in the recent World Track and Field Championships to accommodate for his injury, no one would take him seriously. This comparison assumes that academic accommodations give disabled students an advantage over others. The difference, however, between De Grasse and students with a mental illness, is that students are not asking for a 20-metre head start; mental illness and other disabilities are setbacks which have students starting the race from 20-meteres behind the starting blocks. The purpose of accommodation is not to give them an edge over other students, but to bring them forward to the starting line with everyone else.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says her policy views are "very aligned" with President Trump's, including the belief that four-year colleges are not serving students well.
For a generation now, our PhD graduates have struggled with a shrinking academic job market in Canada, many of them in under-compensated teaching jobs with little support for research, or in non-academic positions. The decline in academic jobs has been addressed primarily as a graduate student issue: PhDs should be better informed about and trained for “alt-ac” careers, while departments should shrink their PhD programs to better match job availability. We frame the problem as one of supply rather than demand.
Nearly 25,700 full-time Ontario college students received tuition refunds after a five-week strike derailed their semester.
Ontario's Ministry of Advanced Education confirmed Tuesday that 10.3 per cent of Ontario's roughly 250,000 full-time college students asked for, and received, their money back after the strike.
Minister Deb Matthews said the figures are still preliminary and could change in the coming weeks as further numbers are reported by Ontario's 24 colleges.
One-third of Ontario students in Grades 7 to 12 reported elevated levels of psychological distress, according to a new survey released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a substantial spike since 2013.
The rate jumped from 24 per cent in 2013 to 34 per cent – approximately 328,000 adolescents – in 2015, an increase called very “surprising” by Robert Mann, senior scientist at CAMH and co-lead investigator of the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups
in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
Since the mid-1990s, there has been an alarming trend on college campuses nationwide: an increase in the number of students seeking help for serious mental health problems at campus counseling centers. In the past decade this shift has not only solidified, but it also has reached increasingly higher levels.
In 2011 there was a loud buzz about gamification - theuse of game lements such as point systems and graduated challenges for activities not usually considered games.
When Western Illinois University’s Board of Trustees on Friday approved cutting four degree programs as majors and modifying four more, it looked like another chapter of belt tightening at a cash-strapped public institution suffering collateral damage amid state budget difficulties.
But administrators didn’t come out and blame finances. The programs arrived on the chopping block because they exhibited declining or low enrollment, Western Illinois leaders said -- not because the university needed to find millions of dollars in savings to make up for an expected plunge.
One night during the third year of my PhD program, I sat on my bed with a packet of tranquilizers and a bottle of vodka. I popped a few pills in my mouth and swigged out of the bottle, feeling them burn down my throat. Moments later, I realized I was making a terrible mistake. I stopped, trembling as I realized what I’d nearly done.
I called a friend and met her in a bar exactly halfway between my house and hers. That night changed things for both of us. She met the love of her life—the bartender, who she later married. And I decided I wanted to live. The morning after, I found a therapist and considered quitting my PhD.
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.
The university as workplace has been imaginatively described by many observers of higher education: at any one university we might find Sanskrit scholars, accountants, glass blowers, philosophers and curators of pregnant hamsters (Henry Wriston, Academic Procession: Reflections of a College President, 1959). However, the quaintness of these occupations (barring the accountants) belies the full reality of the working university in that it fails to include all members of the campus community.
The Wounded Leader: How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis (2002), a recently published book by Richard Ackerman and Pat Maslin-Ostrowski, asks educational leaders to reflect on personal and profound questions - ones they are not likely to have been asked in a formal interview or performance evaluation. Ackerman, co-director of the International Network of Principals’ Centers and Associate Professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Graduate School of Education, and Maslin- Ostrowski, an Associate Professor of educational
leadership at Florida Atlantic University, have spent the past seven years asking school leaders about “wounding” or “crisis” experiences in their leadership practice, and how they make sense of this wounding in terms of
their personal and professional lives.
The aim of this paper is to describe the technical issues to be addressed in enhancing the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) contextual questionnaires instruments for the PISA for Development (PfD) study. We discuss the conceptual framework for the contextual questionnaires used in PISA, describe the evolution of the PISA contextual questionnaires, review the measures used in several other international studies, and consider how the PISA data have been used to address the policy questions relevant to the OECD member countries. This research, alongside discussions with
key stakeholders, including those from participating countries, enabled us to identify seven themes in which the PISA contextual questionnaires could be enhanced and made more relevant for low- and middle-income countries: early learning opportunities, language at home and at school, family and community support, quality of instruction, learning time, socioeconomic status, and school resources. We discuss various options for enhancing these measures.
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.
It’s a confusing post-secondary landscape out there, with universities that are home to colleges and colleges becoming universities. Then there are the polytechnics. A true polytechnic offers four-year bachelor’s degrees, but isn’t a university. It offers apprenticeship programs and on-the-job learning, but isn’t a community college. The wrong thing to do would be to go by the name.
Hundreds of thousands of international students flock to Canadian universities each year. But prospective students from the U.S. may find Canadian schools even more enticing this year thanks to the low loonie.
That’s good news for Canada’s universities and local economies, but it could make it more difficult for Canadian applicants to get acceptance letters from some schools.