Have you ever wondered if your students are as concerned about their learning as you are? If you prioritize student learning, you may be the only person in your classroom with that goal. Learning-centered teachers seek to coauthor classroom experiences with their students, whereas students may seek only to be taught passively. How might you inspire your students to share accountability for their learning? These five considerations can help you teach your students to be learning centered, too.
It has been well established that different segments of the population are more or less likely to aspire to and attend college or university. In particular, students with disabilities, low income students, first generation students, students from rural communities, Indigenous students, and male students are less likely to attend university. These disparities in access are primarily a university issue, in that these groups are not generally underrepresented in colleges relative to the population. Based on these findings, it has been suggested that enhancing the college-to university pathway may be a vehicle to reduce inequities in university access (Kerr, McCloy, Liu, 2010).
The purpose of this study was to examine the profiles and pathways of college-to-university students in order to enhance our understanding of who is accessing this transfer pathway, and their unique needs and experiences. To do this, the motivations, experiences, and outcomes of four groups of Ontario students were examined: 1) College applicants who aspired to complete
a 4-year degree; 2) College applicants who did not aspire to complete a 4-year degree; 3) University applicants with a completed college credential; and, 4) University applicants with no previous PSE. This study also contributes to the literature by offering insights into the factors that may contribute to the persistence and success of transfer students.
Online students need to feel an instructor presence in their classes. Thorough explanations and effective communication help fulfill this need and can transform a mediocre online course into a great one—and it all starts with the syllabus.
A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received "the packet" in my campus mailbox — an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations from my students. Those evaluations mattered a lot to me at the time, as I was still figuring out this whole teaching thing. Was I doing a good job? Did my students like the class? And, more selfishly, did they like me?
Race, abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are among the most uncomfortable topics for college students to discuss, according to a report on a survey of nearly 20,000 full-time undergraduate students at 55 four-year colleges and universities. The report, “2020 College Free Speech Rankings: What’s the Climate for Free Speech on America’s College Campuses?,” released on Tuesday, says that about six out of 10 students said they had censored themselves on these and other thorny issues out of fear of how others would react.
A drum circle is just one of the many activities at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax that focuses on Aboriginal heritage. Photo courtesy Mount Saint Vincent University
Every Catholic college and university in Canada has woken up to the call for truth and reconciliation between Indigenous Canadians and the rest of us.
In response to sweeping curriculum re-design prompted by the Common Core State Standards (CCSSO, 2010), today’s high school English teachers are in search of texts to help them shift from programs dominated by literary analysis to ones well-versed in rhetorical analysis, in which teachers instruct students to read and write arguments using a rhetorical approach. Jennifer Fletcher’s new book, Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response, gives English teachers unfamiliar with the classical tradition of rhetorical strategies a manageable yet thorough introduction to teaching and learning for argumentation.
What will you be expected to publish from your dissertation?
omen and African Americans—groups targeted by negative stereotypes about their intellectual abilities—may be
nderrepresented in careers that prize brilliance and genius. A recent nationwide survey of academics provided nitial support for this possibility. Fields whose practitioners believed that natural talent is crucial for success had ewer female and African American PhDs. The present study seeks to replicate this initial finding with a different, and rguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which brilliance and genius are prized within a field. Specifically, e measured field-by-field variability in the
emphasis on these intellectual qualities by tallying—with the use of a ecently released online tool—the frequency of the words “brilliant” and “genius” in over 14 million reviews on ateMyProfessors.com, a popular website where students can write anonymous evaluations of their instructors. his simple word count predicted both women’s and African Americans’ representation across the academic pectrum. That is, we found that fields in which the words “brilliant” and “genius” were
used more frequently on ateMyProfessors.com also had fewer female and African American PhDs. Looking at an earlier stage in students’ ducational careers, we found that brilliance-focused fields also had fewer women and African Americans obtaining achelor’s degrees. These relationships held even when accounting for field-specific averages on standardized athematics assessments, as well as several competing hypotheses concerning group differences in epresentation. The fact that this naturalistic measure of a field’s focus on brilliance predicted the magnitude of its gender and race gaps speaks to the tight link between ability beliefs and diversity.
Question: What are the merits of a tenure-track job at a small college versus a term/clinical position at a major research university (R1 or R2)? I’m on the tenure track at a liberal-arts college, but on a very low salary. I have a possibility of a "clinical professorship" — a renewable term position — at an R1 university where I would earn a lot more money. But term/clinical positions are not guaranteed job security even at fancy institutions, right? Aren’t those jobs thought of as second class in the higher-education caste system? Any insights you can provide would be appreciated.
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.
Colleges have a big stake in the outcome of the lawsuit that three publishers, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications, brought against Georgia State University officials for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, now in its eighth year, challenged GSU’s policy that allowed faculty members to upload excerpts (mainly chapters) of in-copyright books for students to read and download from online course repositories.
Four years ago, a trial court held that 70 of the 75 challenged uses were fair uses. Two years ago, an appellate court sent the case back for a reassessment under a revised fair-use standard. The trial court has just recently ruled that of the 48 claims remaining in the case, only four uses, each involving multiple chapters, infringed. The question now is, What should be the remedy for those four infringements?
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.
Professionalism, elucidates the philanthropic dimension of the contemporary faculty career. In this volume, scholars address the notion that in addition to teaching, research, and service, contributing to the public good by way of philanthropy is inherent in the fabric of the academic professorial career and as such, they advocate for its recognition as a dimension of faculty work.
When people first think of professorial philanthropy, they may conjure images of faculty engaging in activities such as community service. Shaker takes a different stance, focusing on the element of the faculty role that serves the public good in its broadest form. Therefore, to illustrate this paradigm shift, Shaker reflects on her graduate advisor’s philanthropic actions from which she benefited, including mentorship sessions, motivational meetings, one-on-one writing time, access to
personal office space, introduction to personal contacts, and gifted books. Employing her personal experience as a springboard, Shaker argues that the faculty profession is “grounded in a responsibility to contribute to the public good. The expectation to meet society’s needs for an educated citizenry and societal requirements to advance and disseminate knowledge lend a philanthropic component to the act of being a faculty member” (p. 11). Thus, Shaker asserts that the faculty profession is anchored in the responsibility to growing demands of research productivity and increased pressure for student accountability, calls to both preserve and recognize the importance of faculty philanthropy.
Future teachers are likely to teach as they were taught—which can be problematic, researchers wrote in a recent study, "because most teachers experienced school mathematics as a set of disconnected facts and skills, not a system of interrelated concepts."
For many decades America enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a leader in technological innovation and creativity and most countries of the world looked toward the United States for indications of what was likely to become the next global trend. Clearly, America's pre-eminence in many areas of technology has been challenged by such countries as Japan, Germany and more recently China. However, many innovations and developments of a socio-economic nature also tend to have their origins in the U.S. and are frequently a harbinger of what is likely to occur in three, five or even ten years hence in other parts of the world.
When a person goes to the doctor, it is good to be examined by a professional who can creatively approach diagnosing and developing solutions to physical ailments. When a jetliner is facing a challenging flight situation, it is comforting to know your plane is being piloted by a creative team that will find a way to guide you gently and safely to the ground.
Boundary issues: should a student get a tattoo if it advances her research?
Would you consider getting a tattoo on the basis that it could help you to write your PhD? Or tolerate sexism in order to secure a strong case study for your research?
Such dilemmas faced by doctoral researchers are explored in a recent study that examines the challenges of
conducting qualitative research.
Love him or hate him, there’s lots to say about Donald Trump. But how should instructors handle class discussions about the new president, if they allow them at all? An assistant professor of public and strategic communication at American University established with his students a set of ground rules for talking about Trump, which he says may be useful to colleagues elsewhere as they engage with policy and other issues.
Demographics, globalization and technological change are transforming Canada's labour market. Workers are looking for jobs, businesses can't seem to find the skilled people they need and the game-changing disruptive tech – from artificial intelligence to machine learning – is still at an early stage. As baby boomers leave the labour force and technology becomes more sophisticated, the skills challenges will only intensify.
The changing nature of work will create additional challenges for young Canadians who are already experiencing suboptimal labour market outcomes. Precarious youth employment is on the rise, as jobs for young people are increasingly contractual or temporary. Work in the "gig" economy is increasing, too, and will likely continue in the decades to come.