Here’s a reality many business leaders confront at some point: corporate cultures can eat innovation strategies for breakfast.
The inertia and siloing that can settle into any workplace can be antithetical to the boldness and flexibility required to drive innovation. So, what realistically can be accomplished?
Large organizations typically try to be more innovative by setting up initiatives outside the “mothership,” with mixed results. (Many large teaching hospitals, for example, have adopted this approach). By spurring innovation outside the organization, companies might be able to create incremental change and innovation, but they could have difficulty leveraging these wins in the larger company culture. General Mills, Nestle and Pepsi recently went through experiments with outside incubators, with mixed results. Despite the uncertain evidence, we’re at a tipping point
where if you’re not linked to an incubator, your business is seen as falling behind.
When I was an advanced graduate student preparing to take my chances on the academic job market, I approached the head of the freshman-writing program for a recommendation. "What do you want me to say about you?" he asked.
The question caught me off guard. No professor had ever asked me that before. Without thinking, I told him to describe me as a "teacher-scholar." It made sense at the time, and decades later, I still see myself as some combination of teacher and scholar. So do most of us in academe, I believe — although scientists might prefer a term like "teacher-investigator." ("Investigation" was the all-purpose word used in 1891 by William Rainey Harper, the president of the newly established University of Chicago, to describe what professors would do there once the place opened.)
Scholars who study educational equity and inequality in education, academic achievement gaps, and educational opportunity offer a variety myriad of explanations as to how or whether race has any role or impact on educational experiences, access, or opportunity. Indeed, race has been an abiding question in the social sciences and education for several decades.
Despite the debates within both fields regarding the meaning of race, the current popular sentiment among the lay public and many educational practitioners is that on November 4, 2008, America reached a post-racial moment with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. In other words, according to the post-racial discourse, race no longer matters, especially as it relates to people of color. The editors and contributors of this volume challenge this rhetoric and examine how and whether race operates in understanding how issues of access to productive opportunities and quality resources converge and impact experiences and outcomes in education. Hence, the purpose of this NSSE Yearbook is to explain how and why race is a “dynamic system of historically derived and institutionalized ideas and practices” shaped by myriad forces (e.g., power, gender, language, class, and privilege), which determine the quality of educational opportunities, experiences, and resources for people of color in the United States.
The 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) provided the country with a roadmap for establishing a new, mutually respectful relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Despite the history of Canada's residential school system, the report highlighted the important role of education in the reconciliation process and called upon government and educators to reduce longstanding gaps in education and employment outcomes.
Abstract: The unprecedented transformations which took place in the last few decades in contemporary society impose a permanent revision of the training methods of the future teachers. On the European and international level, we notice a change in the perception of the teaching profession. There is a more acute problem of focusing on the qualification at standards of higher quality in their preparation through the assimilation of key skills. From this point of view, the institutions of higher learning have great responsibility in the training of professionals in the didactic field, so that they can accumulate the skills which are sufficient and necessary to continuous training, according to the principle of lifelong learning. The orientations towards the professionalization of the teaching profession impose a training level of the learners which can adapt to social changes, and to the transformations at the level of the profession through permanent accumulation in lifelong learning.
Key words: education, competences, teaching, critical thinking, reforming.
Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan) welcomes the opportunity to provide the Standing Committee on Finance with its recommendations for Budget 2018. This budget is an important opportunity to build on Budget 2017’s measures aimed at increasing access to skills upgrading and post-secondary education and strengthening innovation in Canada.
Canada’s colleges, institutes, cégeps and polytechnics stimulate innovation, drive productivity, and strengthen the middle class. They offer a vast array of post-secondary programs designed to meet the needs of the labour market, equip graduates with skills that make them resilient in periods of economic uncertainty and disruption, and provide retraining for adults facing job dislocation and unemployment. As the main providers of post-secondary education and skills development for Indigenous peoples, colleges and institutes also play an important role in fostering reconciliation.
Last week we reviewed the reappointment, tenure and promotion process. In this article, we will discuss strategies
for assembling your file for it.
The typical file should include a copy of your CV, a narrative and documents providing evidence of your accomplishments in the three areas of faculty work: teaching, research and scholarship, and service. Those three
components of the file should be tightly integrated to tell a compelling story about your accomplishments.
It’s hard to believe that we have less than a month left until September. The beginning of the month of August marks the acceptable time to get ready for back to school. For many this may simply involve picking up some pencils, notebooks, a new backpack, and possibly some fresh new kicks.
However, for those joining the 447,000 Ontarian undergrads, this checklist goes way beyond object necessities. Being a fifth year student, I pretty much got the drill locked down when preparing for the upcoming year. Look over my class schedule and plan accordingly, check in on my finances and budget for the upcoming year, and finally list out methods in which I plan to upkeep my personal wellness. At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in fulfilling each step, but it is nice to be moving towards a general direction. This definitely was not the case in my first year.
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?
Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won’t see that when I’m teaching.
Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars.
That may seem extreme. After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good.
Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design student-centered learning experiences.
In this article, I provide a few recommendations for flipping a faculty development workshop. For further inspiration, the article concludes with a showcase of the work created by the participants in my workshop last fall.
UBC dataset on PhD outcomes holds key for prospective graduate students to make an informed choice about obtaining PhD training.
Last week, I received an email from my PhD alma mater UBC and instead of a request for donations or an invitation to an event with the expectation of soliciting a donation later, I was treated to a new dataset emerging from the west coast. UBC has collated responses from its PhD graduates between 2005 and 2013 (myself included!) into an outcomes website and document. This is a great move for a number of reasons, but perhaps most importantly, it holds the key for prospective graduate students to make an informed choice about obtaining PhD training – a comprehensive set of data showing what those who have come before you have done.
Every year, some 55,000 students make transfers between post-secondary institutions within Ontario (ONCAT Annual Report 2016-17). Some students decide to transfer mid-degree to enter specific programs with courses they could not take elsewhere. Others may transfer for a variety of reasons, whether it be to make university more affordable, to be closer to family, or to improve the student’s mental health. The choice to transfer institutions is one made with the student’s academic and personal best interests in mind, and oftentimes the student has little to no control over the circumstances driving their decision.
Billboards and yard signs throughout Grand Rapids, Mich., tell students to “Strive for Less Than Five Days Absent.” Leader boards inside school buildings display attendance by grade level. Students who miss too many days are contacted by school personnel and offered support. Since the district began a focused campaign three years ago, chronic absenteeism has dropped from 36 percent to 23 percent. “It is something every community looking at their data can dig into. It’s very actionable,” says Mel Atkins II, the executive director of community and student affairs for the Grand Rapids public school system.
"Plan for the students you actually have, not those you wish you had, or think you used to have, or think you used to be like."
So John N. Gardner, the creator of the term "first-year experience," advised college officials charged with making sure that the experience is a good one. In other words, be realistic; don’t expect too much of students.
That mind-set contrasts with the one evoked by the New Yorker writer David Denby in his new book, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives. The New York Times last week noted, "Lit Up is a refreshing lesson in what motivates students and why not to dumb down reading lists." Denby opens a window into the classrooms of several gifted high-school English teachers who assign Faulkner, Orwell, Frankl, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain — and whose love of reading is contagious to their teen students.
When I think about my highest goal as a teacher, it is to help create responsible citizens who take care of each other and their world.
And the best way that I can help form human beings who do good is to teach them empathy. I’d like to think that the ability to
understand and share the feelings of others is something that everyone is born with, but I also think that it is important enough to
be explicitly taught just in case.
This article explores for a broad audience the changing landscape of education in the digital age, the changing roles of teachers in a technologyrich education system, and the skills, knowledge, values, and ways of thinking that teachers will need to have to support students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development in a digital learning environment.
What does it mean to be a great teacher? Of course credentials, knowledge, critical thinking, and all other faculties of intelligence are important. However, a great teacher should be much more than credentials, experience and intelligence
In 2004, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae was invited to lead the Postsecondary Education
Review to provide advice on the seemingly intractable job of reconciling the province’ aspirations for a high quality, highly accessible and affordable postsecondary education system with the level of financial support that governments have felt able to provide for this endeavor. The report was
considered extremely successful in providing 28 recommendations that were “sensitive to long
standing patterns of public opinion, articulated new public goals, [and] recognized the important
role to be played by each major stakeholder.”(Clark and Trick, 2006, p. 180).
As
Much has been made of the disconnect between rural voters supporting right-wing populist candidates and city folks who vote overwhelmingly more liberal. In the United States, Trump supporters are those who have been left behind by globalization and digitization. They are stranded in small communities unmoored from enterprises that would support gainful employment or in smaller cities that have been left out of the ‘new’ economy. While some argue populist politics are on the decline, we would be foolish to ignore the tensions that lie behind the surface of any Western society.