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.
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.
One-third of Ontario students in Grades 7 to 12 reported elevated levels of psychological distress, according to a new survey released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a substantial spike since 2013.
The rate jumped from 24 per cent in 2013 to 34 per cent – approximately 328,000 adolescents – in 2015, an increase called very “surprising” by Robert Mann, senior scientist at CAMH and co-lead investigator of the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey.
An emerging priority in medical education is the need to facilitate learners’ acquisition of quality improvement (QI) competencies.
Accreditation bodies in both Canada and the United States have included QI and patient safety in their core competencies.
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.
“We need to be having more substantive conversations about teaching and learning in our department meetings. We talk about course content, schedules, and what we’re offering next semester but rarely about our teaching and its impact on student learning. What do you think about circulating a short article or article excerpt before some of our meetings and then spending 30
minutes talking about it? Could you recommend some readings?”
This fifth annual report on national college completion rates offers a look at the six-year outcomes for students who began postsecondary education in fall 2010, toward the end of the Great Recession. It looks at the various pathways students took toward degree completion, as well as the completion rates through May 2016 for the different student types who followed each pathway.
The United States is at a crossroads in its policies towards the family and gender equality. Currently America provides basic support for children, fathers, and mothers in the form of unpaid parental leave, child-related tax breaks, and limited public childcare. Alternatively, the United States’ OECD peers empower families through paid parental leave and comprehensive investments in infants and children.
How can we make assessment more meaningful?
Rigorous assessment is central to education. It tells us whether our students are mastering essential skills and knowledge and whether our teaching is effective.
But grading also provokes much grousing.
Many students complain that grading is arbitrary, inconsistent, and unfair, while many instructors grumble about grade inflation, the excessive amount of time devoted to grading, and the many complaints that grading prompts.
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.”
“Emotions are what make us human. Make us real. The word ‘emotion’ stands for energy in motion. Be truthful about your emotions, and use your mind and emotions in your favor, not against yourself.” – Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad.
All aspects of schooling require social-emotional competency and a mastery of Executive Function. Yet, it is only recently that we have begun to question if and how kids learn these nuanced cognitive and affective skills, as well as how teachers teach them in K-12 education. One incredibly effective method to do this is by founding education in Social and Emotional
Learning methods.
In Educational Leadership for a More Sustainable World, author Mike Bottery uses Rittel and Webber’s (1973) framework of tame and wicked problems across the book’s three sections. This situates and contextualizes current complex and seemingly intractable issues in education by connecting them to equally wicked issues in economics and the environment. Each of the three sections is comprised of three to four chapters.
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.
Several of the largest education publishers say they now generate most of their sales and revenue from digital roducts, but both analysts and some in the industry disagree on if the shift represents a transformation for the textbook industry or a forced rebranding.
Most mental health experts agree that keeping tabs on student suicides could help colleges and universities plan their responses and prevent future deaths.
But, as an Associated Press investigation recently found, most of the country’s largest institutions don’t track the data. And universities that do, experts said in interviews with Inside Higher Ed, gather it unevenly and need to address the topic carefully with their students and the public to avoid glorifying suicide.
Effort and habit are instrumental to learning and writing, but they are often dimly lit in our grading systems. That light needs to brighten with the help of new research and popular literature that highlight how essential habit, effort, and perseverance are to learning. I’ve used an effort-aware grading system in my teaching for some time now, a B- grading contract that locks hardworking students into a minimum final grade of B. For grades rising above B, the quality of the writing is the focus (the product), but only for students who fulfill the contract (the process).
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.
The other day, a person I like and trust sent me a text: “(So-and-So) is throwing you under the bus
right now.”
“No!” I texted back. “What now?”
Thanks to some fast finger work, I provided the real facts about the current meeting topic and my text partner was able to relay them and defend my honor. The crisis was averted and the benefits of cultivating a guardian-angel network were once again revealed.
But cultivating such a network is hard work. And ensuring that every gathering is populated by at least one person who will have your back is an impossible task. So what are the best ways to manage those people who seem intent
on tearing you down?
We've got some big Canadian labour news, folks, but it's a little bit sweet and sour. The sweet is that college faculty
in Ontario are currently leading the charge in Canada to secure a less precarious workplace for sessional
instructors. The sour is that it means they're out on the picket line at the height of the fall semester, and they look
likely to be there for some time.
The low-down about learning at Ontario’s 20 public universities, 24 colleges or 400+ registered
private career colleges.