So much of the work that goes into teaching is necessarily invisible. Nobody sees your best teaching days — when everything clicks, when you get your class to truly see the world differently — except for the students in the room. Most of us don’t teach for plaudits, but it’s a shame that our best work in the classroom is usually unseen by our peers and superiors. It’s also a shame that those of us who want to improve as teachers don’t get the benefit of learning directly from excellent teachers in our fields.
Consider how you learned about your research discipline in graduate school. Sure, you got ideas, advice, and information from your adviser and from other professors, but you also had the benefit of reading other people’s work to see how scholarship in your field was done. When it comes to developing as teachers, however, most of us haven’t been able to learn by watching others. We can hark back to our own teachers, but that’s a pretty limited sample.
Canadian Students Abroad 2016
Canada’s Performance and Potential in International Education
Educators tasked with finding instructional materials for their districts and classrooms face a dizzying array of options these days. Classroom resources are available in print, digital textbook formats, and online. They can be paid for, subscribed to, or downloaded for free. They’re available as comprehensive, yearlong curricula; individual thematic units; and single activities and games.
Happy Thursday, and welcome to Teaching. This week the newsletter is curated by Beckie. First up, Beth shares a scene that stayed with her from a recent reporting trip — and what it means for colleges’ efforts to innovate. Then I’ll fill you in on an effort to improve introductory math, share a list of new books compiled by two of our colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and run through the highlights of a report on assessing student learning.
How many hours should professors work each week? Everyone has a different answer, especially professors.
Case in point: When Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor at Yale University, asserted on Twitter that graduate students should work more than 60 hours each week, a debate ensued. Professors pointed to studies that suggested not everyone can devote more than 40 hours each week to their jobs — for example, if they have kids — or that the institutions and departments they work for may have different standards of work, research, and competitiveness.
One of the most frequent questions faculty ask about the flipped classroom model is: “How do you encourage students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared?”
Teachers can help students strengthen their brain's executive function with "workouts" in which they practice pausing, prioritizing, improving their working memory, and mapping their options.
I’ve been receiving an unprecedented number of calls from presidents across the country asking me to “talk [them] off the ledge.” Most of those conversations have been with presidents whom I judge to be effective and emotionally grounded. Yet each person has been distressed in ways that I didn’t find common during my earlier years in higher education.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
Welcome to Teaching, a newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week Dan describes one reader’s intriguing idea to improve course evaluations, Beckie shares how some of you make use of brain research in your teaching, and we look at the month ahead.
If you or someone you know is suffering from depression, it can be difficult to know where to turn. There are many excellent resources online that you can use to find out more about depression, including treatments, where to get help, and support for family and friends.
Below is a selection of some of the best websites, organizations and other helpful resources available to anyone who has been diagnosed with or suspects they are suffering from depression.
Looking to incorporate some learner-centered teaching principles into your courses but aren’t sure where to begin? Here are 10 activities for building student engagement and getting students more actively involved in their learning.
It’s the first day of class. They shuffle in, spot similar life-forms, and slip in with that group. Hipsters sporting wild hair and tats, buttoned-up and serious young scholars, middle-aged moms and dads, maybe a couple of aging hippies. One or two sad souls choose spots isolated from the others; they don’t want to identify with them for reasons of insecurity, arrogance, or
something else.
The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) represents over 17,000 professors and academic librarians at 28 faculty associations at every university in Ontario. OCUFA represents full-time tenure-stream faculty, and at many universities also represents contract faculty members who work either on a limited-term contract or on a per- course basis.
OCUFA estimates that the number of courses taught by contract faculty at Ontario universities has doubled since 2000.
Having coached academic writers for more than a decade, I've noticed a pattern that tends to stall the development
and publication of their research.
I’ve work with a diverse group of humanists, social scientists, and STEM researchers, but they all hear the same drumbeat: "Get it out there!" The tremendous pressure to complete quality research and then send manuscripts out quickly can warp the writing process. In such a frantic atmosphere, even rigorously trained academics who care deeply about their topics can find themselves working from the outside in, rather than the reverse.
Early in my career, I sat on a doctoral committee in a field outside my discipline for the first time. I recall being startled at the dissertation defense when professors in the young man’s department began delivering scorching assessments of his theory, method, cases, and conclusions. As the incendiaries kept flying I grew concerned about his health. He whitened, started sweating visibly, and several times laid his forehead on the table. When it came my turn to speak, I froze and ended up sputtering, "Well, you have answered all my questions!" and fell silent.
This exercise is key to enabling positive mindsets.
We are in a large classroom. There are at least 20 graduate students ranging in disciplines from engineering to health promotion to gender studies. The room is silent – you could hear a pin drop as each student stands at their own table, intently staring at the large flipchart paper covering it, a stack of colored markers adjacent. The graduate students move erratically –
periods of stillness are followed by bursts of furious writing and drawing. Someone peeking into the room might assume an exam is in progress as the room is quiet yet filled with intensity.
But no – this is reflective mapping.
Reflective mapping is a tool used at Simon Fraser University in the APEX workshop series to help graduate students recognize and gain confidence in their skillsets and experience. APEX was developed in 2013 as a partnership between SFU’s graduate studies unit & SFU’s career services unit. We intentionally created a program that infused constructivist notions of career to
help graduate students engage in self-discovery of their careers over time. A foundational piece is the reflective mapping activity where students engage in making sense of their career experiences, their interests, and their future goals.
Women and Leadership around the World is a compelling body of international research that provides a comprehensive vision of the triumphs, journeys, and challenges encountered by women in various contexts across the planet. This third volume in a new series explores issues pertaining to women's leadership from four regions of the world including the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. This title is published under the rubric Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice.
Engineering leadership education has become increasingly popular over the past decade in response to national calls for educational change. Despite the growing popularity of the movement, however, reform efforts continue to be piecemeal in their delivery, driven largely by the priorities of program leaders who established them (Graham, 2012). If we as engineering educators wish to more systematically develop leadership skills in our students, we should begin by empirically examining and defining our phenomenon of interest: engineering leadership. Our article takes up this challenge by investigating how 82 engineers in five organizationally distinct roles define leadership and how their respective insights are shaped by their diverse organizational loca-tions. After weaving together the perspectives of engineers in industry, hu-man resource professionals, entrepreneurs, politicians and interns, we pro-pose a poly-vocal definition of engineering leadership and identify practical implications for engineering leadership educators.
This report is the culmination of a three‐year research project conducted by George Brown College (GBC). As a member of the Learning Outcomes Assessment Consortium, sponsored and funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), this project responds to HEQCO’s request for colleges and universities to develop, implement and share new assessment tools that “measure and validate the attainment of these generic learning and cognitive skills.”
In this project, we focused on critical thinking (CT), with the goal of addressing a fundamental question:
How do we measure student learning of this essential employability skill during the course of a program of
study?