While we want to instil discipline and responsibility in our students, there is also pedagogical value in compassion.
It’s that time of year again, when panicked students start asking for extensions. They will send desperate emails and come knocking with trepidation on our office doors. They will arrive with excuses and cite extenuating circumstances, and faculty far and wide will have to make tough decisions about whether or not to accept late work.
WASHINGTON -- Harvey Mudd College has a problem. Over time it’s developed a “more is more” culture around faculty work that isn’t, well, working.
Lisa Sullivan, dean of the faculty, wants that to change, she said Thursday at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
“There’s a strong connection between excellence, rigor and pain,” Sullivan said during a session on data-driven strategies for reducing faculty workload. “You know you’ve got it right if you’re suffering a little bit and stressed. If you’re not at that point, then you’re probably not working hard enough.”
This week, Beckie considers professors’ efforts to inspire contemplation among digitally-distracted students and flags a
new initiative to encourage science professors to embrace active learning. You’ll also find suggested reading material
and a tip from a reader.
With the usual mixture of eagerness and trepidation, I waited for student evaluations. As I ended my second semester as an assistant professor last spring, I was acutely aware of the role these evaluations might play in my third-year review and, around the corner, my application for tenure.
My anxiety was tempered, however, by the fact that I had been hearing from my students throughout the semester and had a pretty good sense of how the course worked for them. And because I had my own goals for the course (integrating more student reflection and guiding a research paper with a new process), I was already able to start assessing how successful the course was and what I might try next time.
Do you have anxiety? Have you tried just about everything to get over it, but it just keeps coming back? Perhaps you thought you had got over it, only for the symptoms to return with a vengeance? Whatever your circumstances, science can help you to beat anxiety for good.
Anxiety can present as fear, restlessness, an inability to focus at work or school, finding it hard to fall or stay asleep at night, or getting easily irritated. In social situations, it can make it hard to talk to others; you might feel like you’re constantly being judged, or have symptoms such as stuttering, sweating, blushing or an upset stomach.
Fostering Mentorship
When he was an undergraduate at Denison University in the 1980s, Fred Porcheddu would have told you that his professors were mentoring him. They saw him as a strong student who could follow in their footsteps, and they groomed him to join the professoriate.
Today, Mr. Porcheddu, who is an associate professor of English and chair of the department at his alma mater, sees mentorship differently. It’s something that should be available to all students, not just those at the top of the class. And its goal should be helping students along whatever path they choose, not nudging them into academe.
If you had to pick a cliché that best describes completing a dissertation, "it ain’t over till it’s over" would work well. So far in this series we have discussed finishing a submittable draft and successfully defending the dissertation. But as every doctoral candidate knows, no matter how well the defense goes you are very likely not quite free and clear yet.
The Ontario government has indicated its intention to negotiate individual mandate agreements with each of Ontario’s postsecondary institutions and to amend funding formulas to focus resources on what each institution does best. These actions signal the government’s desire to pursue a policy of greater institutional differentiation within the Ontario public postsecondary system. The purpose of this paper is to advance the conversation by examining differences among Ontario’s 24 colleges on key variables related to programmatic diversity and participation in degree granting.
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.
One thing about student evaluations that troubles me is how they give students the impression that it’s the teacher who makes or breaks the course. A few instruments query students about their own efforts, but I’m not sure those kinds of questions make it clear that what happens in any course is the combined result of teacher and student actions. Early in my teaching career, I heard a wise colleague tell students, “It’s not my class. It’s not your class. It’s our class, and together we will make it a good or not-so-good learning experience.”
My father once told me that the genius of Social Security is that it’s inclusive: Every working American — regardless of socioeconomic class or skin color — pays into the system and is entitled to financial benefits. That’s why it’s popular. I didn’t know it then, but my father was describing “interest convergence,” a theory put forward by Derrick Bell, who said that white people support minority rights only when it’s in their self-interest. Bell’s theory might also explain why affirmative-action and campus-diversity programs that seem to focus narrowly on minority groups might stigmatize those groups further and breed resentment among whites who believe others are getting special treatment. But a provocative NPR piece by David Shih, an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, suggests that we’ve been looking at those diversity initiatives all wrong. He asks, What if those programs actually help white people?
We have an assessment system that is designed for our convenience as instructors and administrators, rather than for the learning needs of our students.
Currently, 41 percent of exam accommodation requests at the University of Alberta involve some form of extra time and are related to mental health. In an opinion piece last August in the National Post, as well as in an academic article in the Education and Law Journal in 2016, Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy argues that extra-time
accommodations are not legitimate and should not be granted because they tilt the playing field against the best students. He compares tests and exams to sprint races, in which it would be absurd to allow extra time or give a head start to some competitors on the basis of disability. He identifies an important problem, but his solution is the wrong one. Extra time is not the only solution to accommodating mental illness in exams, but for reasons that are
very different from those he quotes. In a very effective response published by the Huffington Post, Ontario Human Rights chief commissioner Renu Mandhane covers most of the essentials. Let me add an academic perspective.
Stemming from a series of discussions at recent women's academic conferences in the U.S. and abroad, Women Interrupting, Disrupting, and Revolutionizing Education Policy and Practice is born of the frustration many scholars have expressed over the stagnation of the study of women in educational leadership. Whitney Sherman Newcomb and Katherine Cumings Mansfield
have brought together the works of a broad range of feminist scholarsseasoned and newer academics and studentsto address the questions: in what ways is feminism in the field of educational leadership stalled? What can we do to move ahead?
In 2004, the Lumina Foundation for Education approved a generous grant to support validation research to explore and document the validity of the Community College Student Report (CCSR), add to the higher education field’s understanding of student engagement, and help to identify research or institutional practices that require further attention. The study was conducted in three strands that linked Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) respondents with external data sources: (1) data from the Florida Department of Education; (2) data from the Achieving the Dream project; and (3) student record databases maintained at community colleges that have participated in the CCSSE survey and are either Hispanic-Serving Institutions or members of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). All participating students had participated in the 2002, 2003, or 2004 administrations of the Community College Student Report, CCSSE’s survey instrument.
What will you be expected to publish from your dissertation?
Nine months ago I was annoyingly posting weekly countdowns on Facebook because I was so excited at the
prospect of taking my first sabbatical. Now that it’s (sadly) nearing its end, I’m feeling good about what I’ve
accomplished but there are a few things I wish I’d known that would’ve helped me better plan my “early sabbatical.”
Before I share my lessons learned, I want to define and describe “early sabbatical” — sometimes called a “pretenure
leave” or “pretenure sabbatical.” It’s a semester-long leave granted to assistant professors after a successful thirdyear
review. Not all institutions offer pretenure sabbaticals so if yours does, be thankful. Early sabbaticals have
multiple goals. Most notably, they are an opportunity to ensure you are on track to submit a successful tenure file in
two to three years. To do so, an early sabbatical should meet the following four goals.
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.
Teacher education evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study docyments a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.
I have a question about cover letters. In your blog posts and book, you stress the importance of putting research first in a cover letter for positions at research-oriented institutions, and teaching first for openings at teaching-oriented colleges. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell which camp an institution falls under. Any advice?
Indeed, in presenting yourself as a desirable job candidate for a particular institution, it is imperative that your application materials align you with the main focus — the main mission, if you will — of the place to which you are applying. The cover letter is the first indicator that you understand what will make you both effective and tenurable at a given institution, and search committees looking to fill a tenure-track position want to be sure they "spend" that tenure line on someone who will be successful.
If there’s a downside to another academic year coming to a successful close, it’s reading course evaluations. This post explores how we respond to those one or two low evaluations and the occasional negative comments found in answers to the open-ended questions. Do we have a tendency to over-react? I know I did.