A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
The union representing Ontario college faculty is taking the Progressive Conservative government to court after it terminated a task force that was trying to fix the growing problem of part-time and contract work.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says the College Task Force was a key part of the arbitrator’s decision last year, ending a bitter dispute between faculty members and Ontario’s 24 colleges that culminated in a record-long, five-week strike.
Job enjoyment and stability are not mutually exclusive.
Stress does funny things to our thoughts. We’re all familiar with the fight or flight response and its ability to bring out our inner hunter or sprinter. But when we’re considering different work options, stress seems to induce an enjoy or be practical response. We assume that we can pursue either something inherently rewarding, or something stable and practical, but never the twain shall meet.
I’m not claiming that all jobs are equally stable, or that you should do what you love and expect that the money will, indeed, follow. But the assumption that enjoyment and stability are mutually exclusive is, frankly, a terrible starting point. Don’t consign yourself to a job you’ll dislike without doing thorough research, because stress can make underresearched assumptions seem really, really compelling.
A new study appears to offer additional evidence that drivers are less likely to brake for African-American pedestrians trying to cross the street, a phenomenon known as “walking while black.”
Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas also found that the disparity is greater depending on whether the pedestrian is in a high- or low-income neighbourhood: the average number of vehicles to pass by a black pedestrian who was already in the crosswalk was at least seven times higher compared with a white pedestrian in the wealthier neighbourhood, the study’s lead researcher said.
Generation Z is destined to be the most researched of all generations in history. We understand consumer habits, how Generation Z communicates, even the exact details of how the media influences them. Living under a digital microscope, todays 15- to 18-year-olds are savvy. They have a comprehensive understanding of what they want an
es to technology and education. And with this comes great expectations.
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.
“I want to be able to engage in the grand calling of a Socratic teacher, which is not to persuade and convince students, but to unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on. It's the shaping and forming of critical sensibility. That, for me, is what the high calling of pedagogy really is.”
Fifty years ago, the position of university president was viewed in the US as the pinnacle of the academy and the capstone of an individual’s career. It came with a grace-and-favour home, working hours considered to verge on the leisurely and a certain sense of standing and prestige. It was not uncommon for a man to stay in the position for 15 years or more.
I say man because they were nearly always men – white, married, Protestant men who were invariably affable, intellectually curious, willing to spectate at college sports games and comfortable asking alumni for gifts and bequests. Almost all came through the ranks of the professoriate, often at the institution they went on to lead.
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.
When you think of Canada, you probably think of its picture postcard beauty – wide-open spaces, dramatic mountains, pristine forests and majestic lakes. What might not come to mind, however, is that Canada is a modern, progressive, open and tolerant multi-cultural society with 2 official languages – English and French.
Living in Canada is similar in many respects to living in other Western countries, however there are some aspects of daily life that are unique to our nation. This section of the website will give you a high level overview of our country as well as some helpful tips to know before you arrive to study in Canada.
When colleges talk about diverse hiring, much of the focus — and the funding — goes to recruiting and retaining faculty members from underrepresented minority groups. But a program in the works at the University of California at Berkeley is looking at new ways to elevate an overlooked cohort: minority staff in nonacademic areas, like student-affairs administrators and office managers.
Training sessions will be tailored to the experiences of midcareer staff members from minorities. The sessions are aimed at helping participants understand topics like strategic networking, how the university works, and how to negotiate.
Over time, the labour market has shifted from one characterized by stable or permanent employment to a “gig economy” of temporary or contracted employment, where an on-demand, freelance or contingent workforce is becoming the norm. A gig can be defined as “any job, especially one of short or uncertain duration.”
This type of staffing model allows an organization to fill skills gaps by hiring on a temporary, on-demand basis. These are not the “temps” of the past; instead, they are short- or long-term contracts for personnel ranging from blue-collar light-industrial
workers to highly skilled IT, engineering, accounting and HR professionals.
The news that two publicly funded Ontario colleges are operating men-only campuses in Saudi Arabia feels wrong at first glance.
At second glance, too. There’s bound to be a level of complexity in any business transaction with a repressive country that discriminates against women, among its other human rights sins. Conscious of the yawning gap between professed ideals and entrepreneurial self-interest, we often find it easier to accept the moral contradictions built into real-world relationships as unavoidable and even necessary.
Studying for a doctoral degree can be a lonely, dispiriting experience. You huddle in the library during yet another weekend away from loved ones, frantically searching the basement for an ancient tome that you desperately need to finish your literature
review. Life appears to devolve into a numbing monotony punctuated by paralyzing moments of stress and the occasional minor success. When you reach the all but dissertation (ABD) stage, your waking hours seem to endlessly revolve around a few mundane tasksread, write, edituntil you have successfully completed your oral defense. During the bleakest hours, well before the end is in sight, when your money, health, and resolve are at a collective nadir, it can feel like your path is too long and you are making no progress. Suffering through these moments of tremendous self-doubt, it can feel like there are too many obstacles and not enough support to finish this long, solitary, tortuous journey.
Media and policy commentary have focused lately on Canadian employers’ apparent inability to find employees with the desired labour market skills. To explore this issue further, HEQCO reviewed and summarized the current discourse surrounding a “skills gap” in The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature and conducted an analysis of Canadian job advertisements geared toward recent postsecondary graduates in Bridging the Divide, Part I: What Canadian Job Ads Said. In the latter publication, 316 job advertisements for entry-level positions requiring postsecondary education were examined to ascertain the education credentials, work experience and essential skills employers were seeking. To follow-up on Bridging the Divide, Part I, the current report analyzes survey responses from 103 employers that posted job advertisements included in the preceding study. In particular, employers were asked if they had filled the advertised position or, if not, the reasons for being unable to find someone to hire. Those employers that had filled the position were also asked about the successful candidates’ qualifications and performance on the job so far.
Since the founding of the United States, many Americans have recognized the “fragility and rarity” of democracy (Michelli & Keiser, 2005, p. 246). As a result, many have called for schools to inculcate the values of democracy in American youth (Barber, 1994). As one would expect, the nature of these calls has shifted over time as the perceived needs of the nation have fluctuated. This paper is yet another call for democratic education, an education that is as Ayers (2009) argues “eye-popping and indblowing”
(p. 3), an education that not only promotes and inspires democratic dispositions, knowledge, and values in students, but leads
students through and engages them in the deliberative and collaborative processes of democracy. While contemporary scholars have called for democratic education at the K-12 level in order to increase civic participation (Apple & Beane, 2007; Ayers, 2009; Collins, 2009; Mitra & Serriere, 2015), I join the ranks of those scholars who call for the democratization of teacher education programs as a means to that same end. Soder (1996) explains that while “much has been said about the importance of schools in a democracy…many of those very same people…lapse into uncharacteristic silence as to the education of educators in these matters” (p. 249). In the twenty years since Soder made this claim, more has indeed been written, but arguably the silence around democratic teacher education has been raised to barely a whisper.
Near the beginning of a new study on racial attitudes and college attainment, the authors note the story of Desiree
Martinez, who attended a high school in a low-income part of Los Angeles and longed to enrol at the University of
California, Los Angeles. She confided her ambitions to a teacher. The teacher frowned and said, “I don’t know why
counselors push students into these schools they’re not ready for … Students only get their hearts broken when
they don’t get into those schools, and the students that do get in come back as dropouts.”
On the surface, learning objectives don’t seem all that complicated. You begin with an objective or you can work backwards from the desired outcome. Then you select an activity or assignment that accomplishes the objective or outcome. After completion of the activity or assignment, you assess to discover if students did in fact learn what was proposed. All that’s very appropriate. Teachers should be clear about what students need to know and be able to do when a course ends. But too often that’s where it stops. We don’t go any further in our thinking about our learning objectives. There’s another, more challenging, set of questions that also merit our attention.
After years of taking orders, you finally get to issue them in your first administrative role. You will have the freedom to make your own plans, set your own direction, and surround yourself with people who share your work ethic and point of view. Life is good!
Many factors come into play in determining whether students pursue a postsecondary education. At a broad level, costs, parental and peer influences, and academic achievement all play important roles (Frenette 2007). From a policy perspective, however, family income is generally a key target in the student financial aid system. Many programs are in fact designed to make postsecondary education more affordable for youth from lower-income families.