What do my living room, the Ronald McDonald House in New Haven and the New York City subway have in common? They are all places where I have conducted professional development on a tight schedule. Professional development is the process of developing skills and gaining experience that will help advance your career. Sometimes professional development involves developing skills that are not immediately relevant to your research. My hope for this article is that you will also find professional development opportunities that do not interfere with your academic priorities.
I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been teaching at my best this semester. Oh, there have been some good classes. And I think I'm finally getting a handle on the one group of students who don't want to speak up in class. But in general it feels like I'm going through the motions a little bit, not fully reaching as many students as I have in the past, talking too much from the front of the room. I have a theory as to why this is happening.
This is my fourth semester at the University of Iowa teaching rhetoric to mostly first-year students. After years of adjuncting, it's great to be able to teach the same course again and again. I'm able to learn from my mistakes and improve semester to semester. Even better, prepping for class takes less and less time each semester. I keep an archive of class activities from previous semesters in Scrivener, and I can quickly arrange a few of them to make up a whole class period. It's great.
One of the oldest — and most tired — debates in the education world is about skills versus content. For years, especially in K-12 circles, teachers, administrators, and education researchers have debated whether skills or content are more important for students to learn.
The apparent dichotomy has proven surprisingly sturdy. In an April 2016 report on skills as “the new canon,” The Chronicle detailed an effort at Emory University to shift faculty focus toward teaching the skill of using and evaluating evidence. The story quoted Emory lecturer Robert Goddard, who worried that the move to skills-focused courses was “doing a disservice to the students by not having a more coherent, uniform body of content to deliver.” Such a conception suggests a zero-sum game: More time spent on skills necessarily means less time spent on content.
But if a consensus has emerged in this long-standing debate, it’s one that pushes against an either/or approach.
This summer’s college president departure season is off to a swift start that has largely been marked by little
forewarning from colleges before exits are announced.
Many boards of trustees would consider it best practice to have a quick parting of ways with little surrounding
drama. But it doesn’t always go so smoothly in higher education -- it didn’t last summer -- making the pace and tone
of presidential partings so far this year stand out. Also noteworthy is that many recently announced transitions have
involved leaders who are relatively young or who are early in their tenures.
The president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore resigned just a week after word leaked that all
was not well between her and the institution’s board. That president, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
chair Sheila Bair, was two years into a five-year contract. She cited her family when she departed, but the college
did not go into depth on reasons for her resignation.
Early in my career, I sat on a doctoral committee in a field outside my discipline for the first time. I recall being startled at the dissertation defense when professors in the young man’s department began delivering scorching assessments of his theory, method, cases, and conclusions. As the incendiaries kept flying I grew concerned about his health. He whitened, started sweating visibly, and several times laid his forehead on the table. When it came my turn to speak, I froze and ended up sputtering, "Well, you have answered all my questions!" and fell silent.
Abstract
Canadian students have academic and non-academic obligations, and their ability to balance them may impact university experience. Involvement in academic and non-academic activities, and the perception of balancing them was compared between students with and without disabilities. Results revealed that both groups of students participated in employment, social activities, and family obligations. Furthermore, perceived ability to balance academic and non-academic activities was associated with higher academic self-efficacy and resourcefulness in all students. Relative to non-disabled peers, students with disabilities spent fewer hours participating in non-academic activities, had fewer course hours, but studied as many hours. Students with disabilities who had difficulties balancing their multiple roles were less adapted to university. The time to access accommodations for learning may act as a barrier to adaptation. Creating university policies around accommodations for learning would benefit students with disabilities, and the incorporation of resourcefulness and time-management into university curriculum would benefit all students.
Résumé Les étudiants canadiens ont tous des obligations scolaires et parascolaires, et leur capacité à les équilibrer entre elles peut avoir des répercussions sur leur expérience universitaire. La participation à des activités scolaires et parascolaires, et la perception d’arriver à les équilibrer entre elles a été comparée entre étudiants avec handicap et étudiants sans handicap. Les résultats ont démontré que les étudiants avaient tous des obligations professionnelles, sociales et familiales, peu importe s’ils étaient affligés d’un handicap ou non. En outre, la perception de pouvoir équilibrer entre elles les activités scolaires et parascolaires a été associée à une meilleure efficacité scolaire autodidacte et à un meilleur esprit d’initiative chez tous les étudiants. Comparativement à leurs camarades sans handicap, les étudiants avec handicap consacraient moins d’heures à des activités parascolaires, disposaient de moins d’heures de cours, mais étudiaient autant d’heures. Les étudiants avec handicap qui avaient de la difficulté à équilibrer leurs multiples rôles étaient moins adaptés à la vie universitaire. Comme le temps nécessaire pour accéder aux installations d’apprentissage peut constituer une barrière à l’adaptation, l’élaboration de politiques universitaires autour des installations d’apprentissage serait bénéfique pour les étudiants avec handicap. De même, l’intégration de l’esprit d’initiative et de la gestion du temps dans le programme d’études universitaires profiterait à tous les étudiants.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to reread some of my favorite teaching and learning resources, especially those I haven’t looked at in a while. I’m enjoying these revisits and decided to share some random quotes with timeless insights.
A Q&A with Peter Cornish of Memorial University on the Stepped Care model, which he hopes will get everyone on campus to be part of the support system for those dealing with mental health issues.
In 2014, Peter Cornish helped the Student Wellness and Counselling Centre at Memorial University launch the Stepped
Care program. With this model, the level of intensity of care is matched to the complexity of the condition. When someone
says they are stressed, or they are not feeling happy, then society tends to say, “Okay, go see a psychologist,” said Dr.
Cornish, who is director of the counselling centre. However, not everyone needs to see a therapist all of the time. The Stepped
Care model brings in many other “low intensity” options for the patient that are readily available in the community, but which
we’re often not making use of. University Affairs sat down with Dr. Cornish to find out more about the Stepped Care model and
why universities should consider it.
Academic freedom controversies continue to bedevil universities, highlighted most recently by the stunning episode at Wilfrid Laurier University. That a teaching assistant in a communications program would be reprimanded for showing video clips of a debate on the use of gender-neutral language is almost incomprehensible.
Academic freedom is not absolute, and there are some reasonable constraints that govern its application. But none have been offered that justify Wilfrid Laurier’s rebuke of the teaching assistant. She appeared to have been encouraging debate and civil discourse on a topic about which people disagree. That, indeed, is a key function of academic freedom, and of the university itself.
Canada is one of the most highly-educated countries in the world.
Fifty one per cent of 25- to 64-year-olds have a tertiary (university or college) qualification, up from 41 per cent in 2001 -- the highest proportion among developed countries. That translates to almost 4 million people with a college diploma and five million with a university degree. The number holding doctorates has especially soared, doubling to more than 160,000 over the past ten years. Immigrants hold half of these degrees.
In 2004, the Lumina Foundation for Education approved a generous grant to support validation research to explore and document the validity of the Community College Student Report (CCSR), add to the higher education field’s understanding of student engagement, and help to identify research or institutional practices that require further attention. The study was conducted in three strands that linked Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) respondents with external data sources: (1) data from the Florida Department of Education; (2) data from the Achieving the Dream project; and (3) student record databases maintained at community colleges that have participated in the CCSSE survey and are either Hispanic-Serving Institutions or members of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). All participating students had participated in the 2002, 2003, or 2004 administrations of the Community College Student Report, CCSSE’s survey instrument.
I knew grad school would be difficult, but I was surprised to find one way in which I wanted to work harder: learning
how to talk about science. I grew up seeing science misrepresented or misunderstood in the news and pop culture. I
thought the relationship between science and society needed repair, and I saw scientists’ isolation as part of the
problem. So I couldn’t believe that my Ph.D. program was willing to release me into the world without teaching me
how to talk to people outside academe.
Successfully leading and guiding student discussions requires a range of fairly sophisticated communication skills.
At the same time teachers are monitoring what’s being said about the content, they must keep track of the
discussion itself. Is it on topic? How many students want to speak? Who’s already spoken and wants to speak
again? How many aren’t listening? Is it time to move to a different topic? What’s the thinking behind that student
question? How might the discussion be wrapped up?
I didn’t always want to be a professor, but when I learned what a professor did (or what I thought they did), I decided
it was exactly the profession from which to do the things I wanted to do. My early career dreams primarily revolved
around three things: I wanted to be an actress, an activist and a writer.
Reality got the best of me, and I decided none of those things were viable career paths. Or at least not financially
lucrative career paths, which was a necessity for someone who grew up working-class with a single mom. By the
end of college (which I attended by the grace of loans and persistence), I was enamored with the professors who
taught me theories to make sense of my positionality as a woman, a poor person, a queer femme, a white person,
etc. I also witnessed professors publishing books as well as doing activist work on their days away from the campus.
And they got to perform, in a way, in front of the students they taught. I felt like it was a legitimate dream career, and
I was nothing short of elated when I was accepted tuition-free into a master’s and then a Ph.D. program.
“FBI Insider: Clinton Emails Linked to Political Pedophile Sex Ring,” declared a blog post just days before the U.S. presidential election.
And earlier this year [2017], an online headline blasted: “BOMBSHELL: Trump and Putin Spotted at Swiss Resort Prior to Election.”
There was only one problem. Neither was true at all. Even the sources were suspect.
The headlines, it turned out, were part of the onslaught of fake news that has proliferated. But for Texas A&M senior Ishanee Chanda, the task of discerning between fool’s gold and gold was a no brainer.
"Critical thinking has allowed me to look at the most recent election and the phenomenon of `fake news' with a careful eye," says Ishanee Chanda
Canadian accomplishments in science and scholarly inquiry have long been a source of national pride. However, by various measures, Canada’s research competitiveness has eroded in recent years when compared with international peers. The change coincided with a period of flat-lining of federal spending through the four core funding agencies that support researchers in universities, colleges, institutes, and research hospitals. In those years funds were also directed preferentially to priority-driven and partnership-oriented research, reducing available support for independent, investigator-led research by frontline scientists and scholars.
In last week’s post, we looked at a sample of the discipline-based evidence in support of quizzes with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what it means to say that an instructional practice is evidence-based. We are using quizzes as the example, but this type of exploration could and should be done with any number of instructional practices.
Many colleges and universities want to attract a more diverse work force and foster greater inclusivity in their faculty and administrative ranks, but don't know how. The Chronicle wants to help, so we've recast the weekly On Hiring newsletter and we're sharing stories, news, and data from around the web aimed at helping hiring managers and recruiters make better, more informed decisions about diversity hiring at their institutions and across higher education generally. Here are some highlights from this week's newsletter. If you'd like to receive the new and improved On Hiring and Diversity newsletter, sign up here.
As the world continues to change at a rapid pace, the future remains bright for university graduates. With a growing need for a skilled and adaptable workforce to contribute to the betterment of our businesses, our communities and our province, university-educated graduates are using the advanced knowledge and skills they learn at university to get well-paying jobs in their fields soon after graduation.
The latest Ontario government survey of graduates from undergraduate programs shows that almost 94 per cent have secured employment two years after graduation. The average salary for university bachelor’s degree graduates in full-time jobs was $49,170 two years after graduation, up from the average salary of $41,839 six months after graduation.
The survey of Ontario university students who graduated in 2013, conducted for the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development, concludes that university graduates get jobs related to their education. By giving graduates the advanced skills they need, Ontario’s universities are helping the province unlock the full potential of Ontario’s future and all who live here.
Post-Secondary Education in Ontario: Managing Challenges in an Age of Austerity 905 Region - January 2013