In the early 2000s, anyone learning about pedagogy might have encountered “learning styles,” a collection of theories that assert people learn differently, coupled with the advice to teach in ways that include visual, auditory, and/or kinesthetic learning.
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 the weekly newsletter. If you'd like to receive the new and improved On Hiring and Diversity newsletter, sign up here.
Abstract
This study aimed to better understand campus mental health culture and student mental health coping strategies, and to identify the mental health needs of students as well as gaps in mental health services within postsecondary education. A videovoice method was used to identify and document health-related issues and advocate for change. Forty-one interviews were conducted with campus stakeholders at five universities. Five themes involving mental health emerged from the campus interviews: the stigma of mental illness; campus culture related to mental health; mental health services available and barriers to mental health services on campus; accommodations for students’ mental health needs; and student mental health coping strategies. A documentary was developed to advocate for better mental health. We conclude that although Canadian campuses are raising awareness about mental health issues, there is not enough mental health infrastructure support on campuses; in particular, accessibility to campus mental health resources needs improvement.
Résumé
Cette étude vise à mieux comprendre la culture de la santé mentale au sein de différents campus ainsi que les stratégies d’adaptation adoptées par les étudiants, puis à relever les besoins des étudiants et les lacunes quant à l’offre de services en santé mentale des institutions postsecondaires. Nous avons eu recours à la méthode « videovoice » dans le but d’identifier et de documenter les problèmes de santé mentale, puis de plaider en faveur d’un changement. Quarante-etune entrevues ont été réalisées auprès d’intervenants sur les campus de cinq
différentes universités. De ces entrevues, cinq thèmes liés à la santé mentale ont émergé, soit la stigmatisation liée à la santé mentale, la culture des campus, la disponibilité des services en santé mentale et les obstacles de l’offre de tels services, les accommodements offerts par les campus, et les stratégies d’adaptation des étudiants. Nous avons élaboré un documentaire qui plaide en faveur de la santé mentale. Nous concluons que, bien que les campus canadiens sensibilisent leurs étudiants à ce sujet, il y a absence de soutien en termes d’infrastructure pour la
santé mentale sur les campus. En effet, l’accès des ressources en santé mentale doit particulièrement être amélioré sur les campus.
What if traditional high school transcripts -- lists of courses taken, grades earned and so forth -- didn't exist? That's the ambition of a new education reform movement, which wants to rebuild how high schools record the abilities of students -- and in turn to change the way colleges evaluate applicants. Sounds like quite a task. But the idea is from a group with considerable clout and money: more than 100 private schools around the country, including such elite institutions as the Dalton School and the Spence School in New York City, plus such big guns as the Cranbrook Schools in Michigan, the Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and Miss Porter's School in Connecticut.
The organizers of the effort believe all kinds of high schools and colleges are ready for change, but they argue that it will take the establishment to lead this particular revolution. Organizers believe that if more than 100 such elite private schools embrace a new transcript, they will attract supporters in higher ed who will embrace the approach for fear of losing top applicants (both in terms of their academics and ability to pay). And then the plan could spread -- over perhaps a decade -- to public high schools as well. Along the way, the group hopes to use the ideas of competency-based education -- in which demonstration of mastery matters and seat time does not -- to change the way high schoolers are taught.
Readers of Faculty Focus are probably already familiar with backward design. Most readily connected with such
researchers as Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, and Dee Fink, this approach to course construction asks faculty to initially ignore the specific content of a class. Rather, the designer begins the process by identifying desired learning goals, and then devising optimal instruments to measure and assess them. Only thereafter does course-specific content come into play—and even then, it is brought in not for the sake of “covering” it, but as a means to achieve the previously identified learning objectives. Courses designed this way put learning first, often transcend the traditional skillset boundaries of their discipline, and usually aim to achieve more ambitious cognitive development than do classes that begin—and often end—with content mastery as the primary focus. Although the advantages of backward design are manifest, it’s probably still the exception to, rather than the rule of, course planning.
In fall 2015, Ontario appointed five members to The Premier’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel (Panel) – Chair, Sean Conway, and members Dr. Carol Campbell, Robert Hardt, Alison Loat, and Pradeep Sood (see Appendix E:
Expert Panel Member Biographies). Panel members were selected based on their professional experience, knowledge of the business climate, and relationships with a cross-section of stakeholder groups, and on their understanding of employers, the education and public sectors, and issues related to the labour market.
As we approach the midpoint of the academic year, surges of campus activism will continue to unfold. Some of the issues that will pique students' interest will be obvious, while others will surprise us. No matter the issue or side of the political or philosophical spectrum, it is the commonly understood role of administrators to work with students to support activism in a way that students get their message heard and also optimizes safety and civility.
Joe Biden has a secret weapon in his bid for the presidency: He is the first Democratic nominee in 36 years without a degree from an Ivy League university.
This is a potential strength. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s political appeal has been his ability to tap into resentment against meritocratic elites. By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base. In 2016, two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Mr. Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees.
“Do you know how much this exam is worth?”
“I can’t find any office hours listed for one of my classes—are there any?.”
“What if I get sick and miss a few classes—will my grade be hurt?”
My answer was the same for all three questions—“I don’t know.” Even though these were my first-year seminar students asking these questions, they were looking at syllabi from their other courses, part of a syllabus review exercise I do each fall with first-time students.
Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs, and Sarah Prevette, founder and CEO of Future Design School, are directors of Communitech
Ira Needles had an appointment that he wasn’t going to miss 60 years ago. Something was on his mind, something grand and disruptive. His test audience was a meeting of the Kitchener-Waterloo Rotary Club on August 27, 1956.
Needles, the president of B.F. Goodrich Canada Ltd., issued a challenge to Canadian universities and industries: if Canada was to meet its ambitions to the end of the century, it needed to find another 150,000 engineers and technicians.
He spelled out the solution – the tight integration of classroom learning with on-the-job experience – in the Waterloo Plan, which became the blueprint for co-operative education at the founding of the University of Waterloo in 1957.
The Georgia Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and Arizona State University last year provided students with Echo Dots, puck-shaped, voice-activated devices programmed to answer campus-specific questions about meal plans and business hours for campus buildings.
Some of these Echo Dots, programmed by n-Powered, a Boston-based start-up, can relay individual students’ data, including financial aid and grades. The company’s founders installed 60 of the virtual-assistant devices at Northeastern this past spring.
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."
But even when prospective teachers are taught to teach math conceptually, a good content knowledge base is still
important, the study found.
All of us — even those with the best perception — are always somewhat out of touch with the exact state of the world
we live in. Today, every business is living in a time of great change, and the chasm between what leaders and
employees believe about the state of things seems to be widening.
The State of Inbound, for example, found large discrepancies between how leaders and employees rate marketing
effectiveness, and what tactics they believe are the most effective — from new marketing channels to sales
strategies.
A simplistic response to this tension might be to argue that leaders need to be more realistic and ground themselves
in the everyday realities confronting the average employee. Equally simplistic is the pressure for employees to get in
alignment with the leadership’s goals. But perhaps a different mindset is needed for everyone across the
spectrum: resilience.
I spend most of my days in meetings with graduate students and postdocs, talking about where their careers might go. I jokingly say, “Nobody leaves my office without a networking tutorial.” And it’s true: for Ph.D.s engaged in a nonacademic job search, the concept of networking is omnipresent and unavoidable. Countless resources and articles are available to help novice networkers learn the basics of networking, and everyone knows the best way to become a better networker is to just get out there and network.
In the past fifteen years, there has been a shift in the way researchers have conceptualized identity, moving from the “identity-as-thing” to an under-standing of “identity-in-practice” (Leander, 2002, 198–199). This is not necessarily a new concept, as earlier researchers recognized sociocultural influences on perception (Bartlett, 1932/1995; Vygotsky, 1978) and on the performative nature of identity (Butler, 1990; Goffman, 1959). New Literacy Studies theorists (Barton, 1994, 2001; Gee, 1996, 2000; Street 1995, 1999) began to examine identity-in-practice in relation to literacy. In addition, ethnographic accounts (Heath, 1983; Purcell-Gates, 1997; Taylor, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988) began to document ways that literacies and identities were interconnected. There was an epistemolog-ical shift, underscoring the individual and community practices that help to shape one’s identity. Literacies included all activities inside and out-side school, highlighting the relationship between people’s literacy prac-tices and their situated actions, behaviors, beliefs, and values, or their Discourses (Gee, 1999, 2008, 2011).
A fifth of Canadian postsecondary students are depressed and anxious or battling other mental health issues, according to a new national survey of colleges and universities that finds more students are reporting being in distress than three years ago.
Reports of serious mental health crises such as depression and thoughts about suicide also rose.
During the last third of the twentieth century, college sectors in many countries took on the role of expanding opportunities for baccalaureate degree attainment in applied fields of study. In many European countries, colleges came to constitute a parallel higher education sector that offered degree programs of an applied nature in contrast to the more academically oriented programs of the traditional university sector. Other jurisdictions, including some Canadian ones, followed the American approach, in which colleges facilitate degree attainment for students in occupational programs through transfer
arrangements with universities. This article offers some possible reasons why the Ontario Government has chosen not to fully embrace the European model, even though the original vision for Ontario’s colleges was closer to that model to than to the American one.
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.
I have the mixed fortune of living in a city that, as of this writing, had the highest total snowfall in the United States this year (woohoo Worcester, Massachusetts!). As a skier, I welcome snow; as a homeowner, I have been both lamenting the massive drifts blocking the streets and driveways of our city and cringing at the thought of the water that will inundate our basements in the coming thaw.
As professors are consistently reminded, in a student's world of class rank, graduate school admissions and a highly competitive job market, grades rule. Given that, fairness and accuracy in the testing by which we measure student performance and assign grades is one of the foremost commandments of the professoriate.