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).
The low-down about learning at Ontario’s 20 public universities, 24 colleges or 400+ registered
private career colleges.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
10 questions for universities developing a coordinated response to suicide in their campus community.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death, behind accidents, for young adults, so it is a sad reality that all universities will confront at one time or another on their campuses. During the annual conference of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services in June, Andrea Carter, assistant dean of student wellness, support and success at University of Toronto Mississauga, and Melinda Scott, dean of students at U of T’s University College, addressed a standing-room-only crowd about their experience with student suicides at U of T and how it led them to develop a co-ordinated response. The following is a list of some of the questions that they say postsecondary managers, administrators and crisis-response teams should consider when developing policies or procedures related to suicide on campus:
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.
The history of rankings stretches back to the late 19th century, but it is the intensification of globalisation that has been the most powerful force and explanation for their emergence and success since the turn of the millennium.
Today, as the distribution of economic activity and scientific collaboration has become increasingly international, higher education has been transformed from a local institution into a global actor. It sits at the fulcrum of the geopolitical struggle for a greater share of the global market and the new world-order, facilitating increasing concentrations of wealth and resources and greater hierarchical differentiation and social stratification
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.
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.
Many people decide to get a Ph.D. because they feel a strong personal connection to the subject matter. Thinking, writing and talking with people who appreciate a subject or field of study as much as you feels validating. For some, the discovery of that subject may have clarified a sense of educational purpose. Perhaps it even illuminated a sense of individual purpose or a frame through which the world makes more sense.
Of course, not everyone feels that way about the material they research and teach during graduate school. But for those who do, it can be easy to tie one’s sense of identity to the academic enterprise. “I am a scholar of 19th-century German painting.” “I am an ecologist.” Rather than “I am currently teaching a course on the figure of the child in British poetry.” Or “Right now I am working on understanding the how the charter school movement impacts social mobility for low-income children.”
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.
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.
The evidence is clear that post-secondary education leads to improved employment opportunities and career outcomes. Over the course of their lives, graduates with credentials from across the spectrum of post-secondary programs, including apprenticeships, trade certificates, colleges diplomas, and undergraduate and graduate degrees, have enjoyed significantly higher rates of employment compared with high school graduates. Median annual and career earnings, meanwhile, rise consistently in relation to post-secondary credentials.
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.”
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.