Just starting out? Worried about your lectures, your students, your time-management skills and more? Eight academics offer up their advice.
There are plenty of mistakes to go around early in one’s academic career. Whether they happen in front of a class or
behind the scenes, hindsight shows us how to do better. Here you’ll find a mix of experience and advice from eight
professors who’ve been there, done that and lived to share some lessons.
This morning, I had the opportunity to talk with CBC radio morning shows about academic freedom: what is it and
why is it important to professors. And most importantly, why is it so important that it’s at the centre of a 4-week strike
that has no end in sight?
Academic Freedom has been contorted by many forces: in popular terms, by sensationalist reporting that focuses
on individual instances of a professor doing something bad but being protected from reprisal. But it’s not really that.
Zac Wendler needed a new syllabus. An assistant professor of English, literature, and world literatures at Ferris State University, he was tired of the same routine at the beginning of every semester: He would hand out his syllabus — five or so pages of text — and students would glance at it and wait for him to walk them through it. Then for the rest of the semester, they would ask him questions that could be easily answered if they had read the syllabus.
Does that sound familiar? It rang a bell for me. As I listened to Wendler’s presentation at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland, Ore., I thought about my own syllabus. It has swelled to 11 pages of single-spaced text, even after I changed the departmental policies section to a nine-point font.
Recruiting and hiring are duties that face almost all academic leaders, and they take a large bite out of their time and resources. It makes sense, then, to make every attempt to retain these new professionals. At the 2016 Leadership in Higher Education Conference, Kenneth Alford led a preconference workshop about the development and use of a mentoring program
to help develop and retain new faculty.
Seventy-one is the new 65 for a growing number of professors at Ontario's universities who are staying in the classroom past the traditional retirement age, a demographic shift that is putting pressure on their institutions' budgets, and that could be limiting the hiring of younger professors, a new report being released on Tuesday has found.
One of the oldest — and most tired — debates in the education world is about skills versus content. For years, especially in K-12 circles, teachers, administrators, and education researchers have debated whether skills or content are more important for students to learn.
The apparent dichotomy has proven surprisingly sturdy. In an April 2016 report on skills as “the new canon,” The Chronicle detailed an effort at Emory University to shift faculty focus toward teaching the skill of using and evaluating evidence. The story quoted Emory lecturer Robert Goddard, who worried that the move to skills-focused courses was “doing a disservice to the students by not having a more coherent, uniform body of content to deliver.” Such a conception suggests a zero-sum game: More time spent on skills necessarily means less time spent on content.
But if a consensus has emerged in this long-standing debate, it’s one that pushes against an either/or approach.
It's never easy seeing a student experience distress, but well-meaning adults (myself included) too quickly and too often rush to the rescue. There are times to intervene, but we must be more judicious in knowing when to let students cope with failure on their own. Otherwise, we will raise a risk-averse generation whose members lack resilience and the crucial ability to rebound from failure. To prevent that outcome, teachers and educational leaders alike must be mindful of several situations where helping hurts.
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
As a newly recruited department chair, you have barely moved into your office when several insiders arrive to inform you of urgent personnel problems:
A certain staff member has been failing at his job for years. He is habitually late, and his
work — when he manages to complete it — is full of errors.
An assistant professor is not going to get tenure. Her teaching is consistently rated as
poor, her research record is lackluster, and her service is mediocre.
The director of the department’s graduate program "retired on the job" years ago. All the
metrics of the grad program are getting worse, and morale among the students is low.
Your informants look at you expectantly. What are you going to do about this "problem" person?
In 2018, Nova Scotian taxpayers will spend more than $400 million in support of universities, and another $26 million in student scholarships and bursaries.
The students themselves spend more than that amount on their share of tuition and fees. In addition, most of them study away from home and pay for food and accommodations in the city or town where they study.
Please contact [email protected] for a copy of any of the publications below
This section contains policy, procedures and guidance used by Immigration, Refugees andCitizenship Canada staff. It is posted on the Department’s website as a courtesy to stakeholders.
This month, we’ll focus on how to prepare for existing state and national tests. I’ll focus on three things that can help your students improve their chances to score up to their potential. By the way, kids never score above their potential; they’re just not going to randomly make enough lucky right answers time after time after time (in statistics, it’s called regression to the mean).
But, they often underperform for a host of reasons, even when they should perform much better. While we could focus on dozens of variables that influence standardized testing, we’ll focus on these three: 1) brain chemistry, 2) priming, and 3) episodic memory triggers. Some of these suggestions got so many rave reviews that they are reproduced from an earlier bulletin!
As a new semester approaches, and we put the finishing touches on our syllabi, the issue of how to motivate students is very much on faculty minds. Behind every assignment, reading, and in-class activity lurks the same question: Will they want to do this?
To build an effective network that can lead to referrals, starting early is best.
Networking can happen anywhere; both formally (at an official networking event) and informally (meeting a friend of a friend who works at a company that interests you), as well as online, and in person. However, the very thought of actively meeting new people and conversing can make students shudder (especially us awkward folk), but the process of creating and managing your network connections doesn’t have to be so daunting. While it is work, it can also be incredibly rewarding!
Don’t overlook the benefits of working in a non-faculty role at a university.
It was a chilly December morning at work. I was sipping on my first coffee of the day, reading my emails and making my plans for the day, when an email notified me that one of my publications had been referenced. No way! It had been almost eight years to the day since I defended my PhD thesis and I had long stopped adding research publications to my resumé.
Still, it was exciting to find out someone referenced my research.
Many proponents of online education have speculated that the digital learning environment might be a meritocracy, where students are judged not on their race or gender, but on the comments they post.
A study being released today by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, however, finds that bias appears to be strong in online course discussions.
The study found that instructors are 94 percent more likely to respond to discussion forum posts by white male students than by other students. The authors write that they believe their work is the first to demonstrate with a large pool that the sort of bias that concerns many educators in face-to-face instruction is also present in online education.
Engaging with students – both inside and outside the classroom – who are continually linked in to social media and online devices presents a range of opportunities, challenges and pitfalls.
To some of my students’ displeasure, I have my office hours on Friday afternoons. I prepare for this ancient tradition of face-to-face, pen-and-paper pedagogy by tidying my office, purging unwanted scraps of paper, removing half empty coffee cups, and sometimes even plugging in an air freshener. Then I sit in my swivel chair, arms crossed, and wait for the barrage of undergraduate students to arrive with their genetics questions.
When I was 19 and decided I wanted to become a psychology professor, I did so from the comfort of my dorm room, on the window seat across from a decommissioned fireplace. I’d always loved reading, writing, and talking, so what better career for me than academe? I could not have known that my vision of faculty life would become anachronistic by the time I was out of graduate school.
I am one of an increasingly small group of Ph.D.s whose faculty dreams have been realized. I have a tenure-track job with paid sabbaticals and institutional support for my research. I’ve written a book. But with each passing year, my experiences as a faculty member are less and less the norm. What it means to be a professor has changed for many other Ph.D.s — largely because academic life and culture is nothing like it used to be.
There’s only one first day of class. Here are some ideas for taking advantage of opportunities that are not available in the same way on any other day of the course.