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
I have been wanting to write about tired teaching for some time now. Concerns about burnout are what’s motivating me. Teachers can reach a place where teaching does nothing for them or their students. They don’t just wake up one morning and find themselves burned out; they’ve moved there gradually, and it’s a journey that often starts with tired teaching.
There’s nothing on the subject in my big file of articles and resources. I can’t remember having read about it, and I’m not sure how much we even talk about it. We do talk about being tired. Teaching is relentless. It happens every day, several times a week—or potentially 24/7 if it’s online. And it’s demanding. There’s so much more than the actual teaching. There’s considerable planning involved before each class. Plus, we need to spend time with students—those who want to talk, those needing
help, and those with questions or, sometimes, complaints. There are assignments to grade and feedback to provide—
all carrying the expectation of a quick turnaround. With multiple courses to teach, we do get tired, but I think we regularly confuse physical fatigue with the more serious emotional tiredness that comes from a heavy workload of always being there, always giving, and always juggling multiple balls in the air.
When approached for a letter in the bleak midwinter of recommendation-writing season, many of us wish for responsible ways to say, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not to.” Yet in weak or guilty moments, we may accede to a student’s plea and then spend hours racking our brains for something to say.
It’s hard for a scrupulous teacher to resist the fear that, in declining to write a recommendation, you may be torpedoing someone’s professional life. Ultimately, though, a student’s application materials will speak for themselves and the professional world will make its own judgment, fairly or not. Disappointment, even heartbreak, is a reality from which even the deserving can’t always be shielded. And you aren’t obligated to make a case for a student whom you can’t, in good conscience, support.
Many universities have implemented campus-based initiatives addressing students’ mental health with the goal of promoting well-being. One such initiative is the newly developed Counsellor-in-Residence (CIR) program at the University of Calgary, which targets students’ mental health by providing residence- based counselling services and mental health programming. In this
process evaluation, students completed three waves of data collection conducted over the academic year. Each wave measured students’ mental health literacy, using the Mental Health Literacy Scale (O’Connor & Casey, 2015), and resiliency, using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-25 (Connor & Davidson, 2003). Males reported lower mental health literacy than females (p < .001), and international students reported lower mental health literacy than domestic students (p < .001). No differences in resilience levels were found between groups. These findings suggest that male and international students experience additional barriers to accessing campus-based mental health services. Implications for residence-based mental health programming that target male and international students are discussed.
Partnerships between public and private colleges, which have brought thousands of new international students to Ontario, carried unacceptable risks to the students, the province and the quality of education, says a report for the provincial government that led to a moratorium on the programs.
This paper challenges conventional wisdom about the drivers of international community at the individual level. Presenting
new data and a novel natural experiment approach to the study of cross-border contact and international community,
it tests some of the key microfoundations of international relations theory about how a sense of shared international community may arise and evolve among individuals. The hypotheses are tested using survey data from a large sample (n = 571)
of American study abroad students in a range of universities across a treatment and a control group. Surprisingly, findings
do not support the main hypothesis that cross-border contact fosters a sense of shared international community. However,
the second hypothesis drawn from the liberal paradigm, suggesting that cross-border contact lowers threat perceptions, is
strongly supported. The “Huntingtonian” hypothesis that cross-border contact heightens nationalism also garners wide
support. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for theory and future research, especially the potential
of rethinking the drivers of international community at the individual level to rely less on a sense of shared identity and
essential sameness, and more on a feeling of “enlightened nationalism” and appreciation for difference.
As the cost of college has risen, so has the number of students who are struggling to meet their basic needs. In one
recent survey, more than one in five students said they had gone hungry in the past month. Close to one in 10 said
they had been homeless at some point in the past year.
Three rising juniors describe how they made it to college despite lacking steady housing, regular meals, and the
tools to complete their high-school assignments.
To form a truly educated opinion on a scientific subject, you need to become familiar with current research in that field. And to be able to distinguish between good and bad interpretations of research, you have to be willing and able to read the primary research
literature for yourself. Reading and understanding research papers is a skill that every single doctor and scientist has had to learn during graduate school. You can learn it too, but like any skill it takes patience and practice.
Statistics Canada recently released its comprehensive reports on education, covering a wide range of topics, including overall education attainment and the skills mismatches and earnings potential of those with bachelor’s degrees. There was good news and bad news.
StatsCan reported that in 2016, 54 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 64 had either college or university qualifications. Canada continued to rank first among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the proportion of college and university graduates. That’s good news.
1) Strengthening our Canadian fabric
• How many newcomers should we welcome to Canada in 2017 and beyond?
• How can we best support newcomers to ensure they become successful members of our communities?
• Do we have the balance right among the immigration programs or streams? If not, what priorities should form the foundation of Canada's immigration planning?
When leaders of the world’s seven most advanced economies meet on June 8 and 9 in Charlevoix, Que., the top-line agenda item will be preparing for the jobs of the future.
What exactly does this agenda item mean for the Canadian workers, students and employers?
The proliferation of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced robotics are changing the face of work. Some jobs will be fully automated. Others will require humans to work alongside emerging technologies, leveraging the best of what machines are good at – routine tasks and analytics – against what humans are best at – critical thinking and creativity.
Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in all its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. Because . . . technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he reg-isters his demands on it. (Benjamin, 1936/2008, p. 242)
"Administration" is a cold word. Yet — whether our many campus critics believe it or not — most full-time administrators have very deep feelings about the work they do. I was no exception. I got into the racket as an advocate for doctoral students in English, and I approached all my administrative work as a calling.
Since January, some people have wondered what implications the selection of Betsy DeVos as the U.S. secretary of education may have for higher education. This discussion leads to an important practical question: In what ways can the government successfully increase college graduation rates? This issue is especially salient, as many college students are preparing to receive their degrees in the next few weeks.
In our recent extensive review of over 1,800 research studies on college students, we found that some of the most common approaches for promoting student success simply aren’t effective. For example, most states have moved to performance-based funding for supporting their public colleges. Instead of giving money based on how many students are enrolled, some funding is based on a measure of institutional performance, such the number of students who graduate or the number of courses completed.
We are a group of undergraduate and graduate students from York University connected with each other through sociology professor Cary Wu’s research methods courses. Led by Dr. Wu, we recently came together as a virtual group to discuss what makes in-person classes unique and different from online-learning. Through this productive discussion, we were able to determine what it is about in-person classes that we long for. Here, we share with you seven main themes that emerged in our conversations.
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.
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.
This press release from the Council of Ontario Universities shows that students NOT coming direct from high school now constitute 24% of all new admissions, and enrollments from this sector are increasing faster than those from students coming direct from high schools.
This trend is likely to continue and grow, given the demographics of Canada. Birth rates are low (the City of Vancouver has 60,000 less k12 students than it did 10 years ago, although some of this is due to families migrating to Surrey and other cities/suburbs, where house prices are more affordable), whereas the demands of the workplace and in particular the growth of knowledge-based industries is requiring continuous and lifelong learning.
Background/Context: Facilitating dialogues about racial issues in higher education classroom settings continues to be a vexing problem facing postsecondary educators. In order for students to discuss race with their peers, they need skilled facilitators who are knowledgeable about racial issues and able to support students in these difficult dialogues. Yet previous research on difficult dialogues has largely focused on students experiences in these dialogues and the outcomes they gain from participating in them with little knowledge about the olres of facilitaros of these dialogues.
As women move up the leadership ranks in higher education, they find fewer and fewer female peers. That’s been fairly well documented by the American Council on Education and other sources, and is no surprise to those of us in the executive-search industry.
Why that’s the case is a topic fraught with complexity. There is the matter of stepping up and Leaning In to be sure, but there is also sexism — sometimes the overt kind and sometimes the subtle kind that occurs all along the leadership trajectory and affects who is mentored, who is labeled "leadership material," and who gets the kind of opportunities and assignments that lead most directly to advancement.
Of the many factors that limit women’s advancement, two are things we ought to be able to resolve: how candidates present themselves in job interviews and how search committees interpret those interviews.