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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.
As professors are consistently reminded, in a student's world of class rank, graduate school admissions and a highly competitive job market, grades rule. Given that, fairness and accuracy in the testing by which we measure student performance and assign grades is one of the foremost commandments of the professoriate.
This semester I’m teaching a comparative-literature class that deals with the connections among empathy, literature, and human rights. As in most of my classes, which all circulate around these difficult topics, I constantly prepare my students for their own navigation into the worlds of trauma and critical understanding. The problem this semester, and most semesters, is not the voyage inside historical traumas. The problem goes much deeper — it is my students’ fragility.
Awareness contexts are useful concepts in symbolic interactionist research, which focusses on how everyday realities are constructed. To provide a fresh perspective on governance in Canada’s colleges, I sorted vignettes in interview data collected from administrators and faculty into four types of contexts originally derived from observation of interaction between physicians and patients around bad news. These theoretical categories were introduced by Glaser and Strauss in their 1965 book Awareness of Dying. Applying this lens revealed a “closed awareness” context around college fund-raising and a “mutual suspicion” context in administrator-faculty interaction around student success policy. Examples of “mutual pretense” included feigned administrator-faculty cooperation around changing college missions and faculty workload formulas. “Open awareness” or dialogue, however, occurred where professional bodies or unions intervened. Sorting by awareness contexts reveals similarities between doctor-patient and administrator-faculty interactions. For example, just as doctors feared that delivering bad news to patients might precipitate “mayhem” in the hospital, college administrators may fear that openness around divisive topics might precipitate “mayhem” in college management.
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.
When I interviewed for my current job, running a small graduate and postdoctoral career and professional development program in a hospital-based research institute, we got onto the topic of alumni data tracking. My program had an exit survey on their website, one that suggested they were collecting contact information and checking in with PhDs in the years after they'd left our institution to see how and what they were doing. (It turns out that no one knew the form was there, and it hadn't been used in many years.) We then got to talking about program evaluation, one of my favourite subjects, and about how we could start assessing if the professional and career development work we were doing--if they hired me--was having any effect on the post-PhD lives of our graduate students and postdocs.
Chloe’s boyfriend hit her so hard she suffered a concussion, permanent hearing loss and, according to her psychologist, post-traumatic stress disorder. She says what Concordia University in Montreal did to her was worse.
Chloe, who asked that her real name not be used, was a first-year student at Concordia in September 2014 when her boyfriend, whom she’d been dating for a little over six months, punched her repeatedly in the head.
Her neighbours called the police; he was arrested and charged with assault. Chloe says the man, also a Concordia student, assaulted her twice more on campus: the first time choking her and the second hitting her in the buttocks so hard it left a bruise. After the second incident, he was arrested again and charged with violating court-imposed conditions restricting his ability to contact her.
Joe Biden has a secret weapon in his bid for the presidency: He is the first Democratic nominee in 36 years without a degree from an Ivy League university.
This is a potential strength. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s political appeal has been his ability to tap into resentment against meritocratic elites. By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base. In 2016, two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Mr. Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees.
Meaningful technology use in education continues to improve given an increase in access to available technologies and professional development. For educators, professional development has focused on approaches for technology use that foster content-specific best practices and improve student learning in traditional classroom formats. Meaningful technology integrations are not, however, limited to traditional classrooms. In fact, the push for distance and online education in postsecondary contexts has complicated the issue; faculty must develop and balance content-specific practices with technology
pedagogies for asynchronous learning environments to maximize opportunities for student learning. In this article, the authors discuss the findings from a secondary review of research and theoretical applications for faculty development. One model for faculty training based on these findings is posited.
IT HAS become a truism that we live in an age of rapid and profound change. The growth of freedom of thought, the use of the scientific method, the advance of the industrial revolution, the rise of political and economic democracy, and the everwidening applications of technology— culminating in the atomic age—are recasting the thoughts and actions of men into strange new patterns.
performance throughout the course, especially for those students who do poorly on the first test. Faculty and institutions provide an array of supports for these students, including review sessions, time with tutors, more practice problems, and extra office hours, but it always seems it’s the students who are doing well who take advantage of these extra learning opportunities. How to help the students who need the help is a challenging proposition.
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.
After years of collecting literally millions of documents and hearing the stories of thousands of aboriginal people who
experienced abuse at residential schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is ready to archive this material, much of it brutal and heartbreaking, in the new National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba. Scheduled to open to the public this fall, it will serve as a rich repository and essential historical record of a haunting and tragic chapter of First Nations and Canadian history.
Kathryn DeWitt conquered high school like a gold-medal decathlete. She ran track, represented her school at a statewide girls’ leadership program and took eight Advanced Placement tests, including one for which she independently prepared, forgoing the class.
Expectations were high. Every day at 5 p.m. test scores and updated grades were posted online. Her mother would be the first to comment should her grade go down. “I would get home from track and she would say, ‘I see your grade dropped.’ I would say, ‘Mom, I think it’s a mistake.’ And she would say, ‘That’s what I thought.’ ” (The reason turned out to be typing errors. Ms. DeWitt graduated with straight A’s.)
Intellectual property is important in our universities but it sometimes raises thorny issues. Unlike the United States, which has the Bayh-Dole Act – legislation governing intellectual property generated by federally funded research – Canadian universities are free to have their own individual IP arrangements. The Bayh-Dole act permits 50 percent of the IP to be assigned to the researcher and another 50 percent to the university. This act presumes that the universities will play a role in the protection and commercialization of the IP. Certain institutions, such as MIT, contribute a certain portion of their share back to the researcher.
Canada has a long history of online and distance education, but until 2017 there had been no comprehensive national data on online enrolments in both the university and college sectors. However, in 2017 a team of independent Canadian researchers,
working in collaboration with the Babson Survey Research Group and WCET in the USA, raised the funding and conducted a national survey of online learning in all public post-secondary institutions in Canada. The results from the survey are
presented and discussed, as well as plans for further studies in the future.
Keywords: Online learning, Distance education, Canada, Survey methodology, Post-secondary education
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.
We all know raising children is different from teaching undergraduates. Yet as a father of four children — now all grown — I have learned much from parenting that I have been able to apply to the college classroom.
In particular, raising four teenagers taught me a lot about how to reach, engage, and motivate teenage students. The trick to effective parenting, I’m convinced, is to allow children to exercise their agency — encouraging them to make good choices through a clear system of rewards and punishments, with the emphasis on the former. I believe that’s true in teaching, as
well.
As longtime practitioners in our disciplines, we develop implicit skills that can be the source of some of the deepest learning for our students. In his book Experience and Education, John Dewey describes habit as “the formation of attitudes, attitudes that are emotional and intellectual…our basic sensitivities and ways of responding to all the conditions we meet in living” (35). Experiencing implies the sensing body, embodied learning, and Dewey does not shy away from the emotional dimensions of learning—both of which are often where the deepest learning happens, where students’ passion for a discipline ignites, and where experts’ best ideas originate. These often-overlooked dimensions of learning are also where empathy lives, and so it is there that knowledge might blossom not only into expertise but into wisdom
ew report on transfer of struggling students from universities to community colleges finds students benefit from moving in nontraditional direction.