Professors always believe their own fields are central and vital to education — and to life. So I can be forgiven for pointing out that a great deal of evidence supports the idea that superior communicators succeed disproportionately in every profession. For example, when Google identified the "eight habits" of its best managers, the first seven were communications skills. Only the eighth was technical knowledge.
Fifty-three years ago, a Progressive Conservative education minister unleashed what is still the most significant transformation of higher education in Ontario. Bill Davis pushed legislation to create the community college system, which diversified the provision of education and training and laid the foundation for the dramatic expansion of postsecondary access that has
made Ontario a leader in educational attainment internationally.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his cabinet were sworn in on Friday, June 29, and many in the higher education community are wondering what this new government will bring to the sector. Wherever they fall in the political spectrum, however, no one is holding their breath in anticipation of big ideas or transformative change.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to call on students to get them to participate. They would be fully invested in our courses, and would come to class eager to play an active role in the day’s activities. They would understand that more participation equals more learning. We wouldn’t be sergeants at the front of the room, putting our conscripts through their paces. Rather, we’d be facilitators — helping our students when we can, asking guiding questions,
suggesting new paths of inquiry.
But of course we don’t live in an ideal world. Instructors everywhere struggle with quiet classrooms, with discussions that die before they get started. Our questions hang in the air for what feels like minutes, and students seem to be trying to find out how little they’ll have to do before the end of class arrives. While there are things we can do to create better class discussions, it’s hard to get away from the prospect of cold-calling.
Relax, I'm not calling you stupid. For any millennial readers, I’m just paraphrasing Bill Clinton’s unofficial campaign slogan from 1992: “It's the economy, stupid.” His purpose was not to insult supporters or alienate undecided voters, but rather to constantly remind himself and his staff of what he considered the most important issue in that election.
In much the same way, if you’re planning to apply for a full-time faculty position at a two-year college this fall, I would encourage you to adopt my revised version of Clinton's slogan as your personal motto. Because even though you will probably be required to submit multiple documents
— including a CV and an official employment application —
the single most important one will be your cover letter.
I intend to never grade another paper.
At the height of my adjunct "career" teaching writing, world religions, and general humanities courses, I taught up to 12 courses a year at three different institutions in the Houston area. I juggled about 400 students a year in my courses, and each student wrote three to five papers. Do the math — that’s a lot of grading.
I worked that oxymoronic full-time adjunct load for a decade — in addition to teaching a few continuing-ed courses just for kicks and extra income. In short, I taught more students and graded more papers in a decade than most of my full-time colleagues at the same university would teach in their entire careers.
For a while, I was sort of an adjunct guru. I self-published a book called How to Survive as an Adjunct Lecturer: An ntrepreneurial Strategy Manual and ended up writing a monthly advice column on The Adjunct Track for The Chronicle. I also provided coaching to other non-tenure-track instructors to help them figure out ways to work the system and squeeze as much money out of it as possible. The idea was to come as close as they could to an income that honored their knowledge and credentials — or to at least not have to wait tables on nonteaching days to make ends meet.
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.
In the past few years, the business world has increasingly embraced failure. Entrepreneurs, once coy about past losses and missteps, now flaunt their failures like badges of honour. The idea of “failing upward” has become a recurring motif in blog posts, TED Talks, business conferences and self-help books – and this fetishization of failure has started to infiltrate the world of higher education.
When it comes to connecting with students, good relationships and good rapport go hand in hand. The desired rapport develops when faculty are friendly, approachable, respectful, and caring toward students. And how do students respond to professors who’ve established good rapport? They “like” those professors, and that’s the point at which some of us experience a bit of nervous twitching. If students like us, does that mean they learn more? Does education hinge on the popularity of the professor? The ethical ground feels stronger if what students learn and take from their educational experiences results from actions that support learning. And that circles us right back to rapport and the powerful role it plays in determining how students respond to the content in our courses, their daily attendance, and the study time they devote to what we’re teaching. Student commitment to a course increases if rapport with the instructor is good. So, be nice, chat with students, and show that you love teaching.
The current Annual Report uses visualizations developed from years of CCMH data to
explore college student mental health with an emphasis on individual counseling provided
by counseling centers. To start, it is worth briefly reviewing the findings from the last two
Annual Reports:
• 2015 Annual Report: Counseling center utilization increased at 5 to 6 times the rate of institutional enrollment, during the preceding five years. This increase is primarily characterized by students reporting a history of “threat-to-self ” characteristics, and these same students use about 20-30% more services.
• 2016 Annual Report: Counseling center resources devoted to “rapid access” services increased by 28%, over the prior six years, whereas resources devoted to “routine treatment” decreased by 7.6% on average.
Having the highest levels of skills in problem solving using ICT (information and communication technologies) increases chances of participating in the labour force by six percentage points compared with adults who have the lowest levels of these skills, even after accounting for various other factors, such as age, gender, level of education, literacy and numeracy proficiency, and use
of e-mail at home.
This qualitative investigation addresses three new universities in the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta and their presidents’ ascriptions of organizational identity to their universities. Through extended, semi-structured interviews
and narrative analysis, this investigation uses organizational identity theory and institutional theory to explain the positionality and understandings of presidents in relationship to their universities’ paths to legitimacy. We found that the preservation of aspects of the institutions’ original identity (as community colleges) aids new universities’ organizational change. Furthermore,
while presidents advocated for a replacement of community college logics with university logics, data showed that these three new universities had yet to embrace the university logic fully. We propose that a blending of logics may be the preferred mechanism for the attainment of legitimacy during sectoral change for new universities.
Team research is the source of some of the great breakthroughs of all time, such as the 1947 invention of the transistor, which took the complementary skills of applied researcher Walter Brattain, quantum theory researcher John Bardeen and solid-state physicist William Shockley. And today, despite the expediency of individual work, researchers are moving strongly and clearly in favor of teamwork because of its often strong advantages.
In the early 1970s, Rosalind Driver, then a graduate student in education at the University of Illinois, had a peculiar notion. To understand how children learn important scientific concepts,she argued, we first need to grasp how they see the world before they start school. Children do not come into their first science classrooms as blank slates, with no sense of the natural world or of the way objects move in space. Talking with children, Driver showed, often revealed that they had quite fully developed (if incorrect) ideas about scientific phenomena.
Her crucial — and radical — insight was that learning is dependent on preconceptions. We learn by revising our understanding of things.
Last month , I opened up about one of the side effects of doctoral study that I hadn’t anticipated: the Ph.D. identity crisis.
With the date of my dissertation defense looming in four months, I’d begun to realize that I couldn’t answer two rather important questions:
Who am I outside of "Ph.D. Candidate"?
What do I want out of life and this degree?
As a Biomedical Sciences major, I completed the two required “Physics for the Life Sciences” courses during the first year of my undergrad, and never considered those concepts again. Until now. I’m doing my doctorate in cardiovascular science, and the physics of blood flow has become an important element of my experiments. The little I remember from those two courses is far from sufficient for my current project. I’m now trying to teach myself the basics of fluid dynamics so I can properly understand and explain my own project.
As a former university professor, and as a historian of higher education, I’m gratified (mostly) by the vigilant defence of academic freedom proffered by journalists and others in the wake of the Andrew Potter episode at McGill University. Academics who speak or write controversially should be protected, not sanctioned.
Still, there is too little understanding of what academic freedom means. It is not absolute and it is not the simple equivalent of “freedom of speech.” All citizens have, or should have, the latter, but only individuals who have specified educational and professional qualifications are entitled to academic freedom within universities. In the words of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), they are granted the “freedom to teach and discuss; freedom to carry out research and disseminate and publish the results thereof; freedom to produce and perform creative works; freedom to engage in service to the institution and the community; freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works.”
Employers value candidates who have developed career readiness competencies throughout their diverse academic experiences. Graduate students and postdocs in particular should aim to incorporate those transferable skill sets into their professional development so that they can be seen as more than just researchers and teachers. More than that, they need to be able to provide tangible illustrations of such skills and competencies in action to convince future employers that they are qualified for professional
roles.
For 10 years, I’ve been teaching study skills to college students, both individually and in the classroom. The vantage from my office offers me a clear view of students devouring information during tutoring appointments and focusing intently on the strategies shared during study skills counseling sessions. The effort and time they pour into comprehending their course material is irrefutable. However, when I ask students what they know about the lecture's content before arriving at class, the answer is almost always the same: “Nothing.”
The classroom is a non-stop hub of feedback: test grades, assignment scores, paper comments, peer review, individual conferences, nonverbal cues, and more. Feedback is essential for student learning.
Still, students’ ability to process and use feedback varies widely. We have some students who eagerly accept feedback or carefully apply rough draft comments, while many others dread or dismiss their professors’ notes or reject exam grades as “unfair.” Although feedback is integral to our classrooms and work spaces, we often forget to teach students how to manage it.
The rapid turnover of technology and ever expanding network of data and information which underpin the knowledge economy have led to a reevaluation of the importance of knowledge to the economic process. Economists now conclude that human capital - the ideas, skills, and expertise of people - is a fundamental driver of economic growth. Demand for employees that possess a mix of both “hard” and “soft” skills is rising as companies respond to intensified global economic competition.