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.
This time of year has always been my favorite. Back to school once meant new clothes, new notebooks, and new
hopes of avoiding the dreaded bottom locker. Now, as a professor, I retain the joy I have every August when I get
new colleagues, new students, and yes, new clothes. Mostly though, I’m excited about the opportunity to start fresh
and do a better job than I did the year before.
To begin that process, I revise and enhance my professional networks — because a new academic year should
bring with it new relationships and new opportunities.
Billboards and yard signs throughout Grand Rapids, Mich., tell students to “Strive for Less Than Five Days Absent.” Leader boards inside school buildings display attendance by grade level. Students who miss too many days are contacted by school personnel and offered support. Since the district began a focused campaign three years ago, chronic absenteeism has dropped from 36 percent to 23 percent. “It is something every community looking at their data can dig into. It’s very actionable,” says Mel Atkins II, the executive director of community and student affairs for the Grand Rapids public school system.
Abstract
At one of Ontario’s largest universities, the University of Ottawa, course evaluations involve about 6,000 course sections and over 43,000 students every year. This paper-based format requires over 1,000,000 sheets of paper, 20,000 envelopes, and the support of dozens of administrative staff members. To examine the impact of a shift to an online system for the evaluation of courses, the following study sought to compare participation rates and evaluation scores of an online and paper-based course evaluation system. Results from a pilot group of 10,417 students registered in 318 courses suggest an average decrease in participation rate of 12–15% when using an online system. No significant differences in evaluation scores were observed. Instructors and students alike shared positive reviews about the online system; however, they suggested that an inclass period be maintained for the electronic completion of course evaluations.
Canadian universities have traditionally enjoyed high levels of autonomy from governments, relative to their counterparts in other parts of the world. As recently as the 1990s, a couple of studies (Richardson and Fielden, 1997; Anderson and Johnson, 1998) concluded that the level of government intervention in Canadian universities was lowest or amongst the lowest of the
many countries studied.
I had an experience recently that confirmed what I’d already suspected: I am no longer an early career scholar. Perhaps because of my age, or simply because I am pre-tenure, I had still considered myself to be "early" in my career until that moment.
It happened a week before my discipline’s biggest conference. As I was checking the online schedule for pre-meeting workshops, I found an intriguing one for "early career scholars of color." But after reading the agenda, I realized I wouldn’t benefit from the content. The lineup included sessions on developing career goals, publishing a dissertation, preparing for the job market, crafting a strong CV, negotiating a job offer, publishing your first book, finding a mentor. As an assistant professor, I’d already done those things. I read the list multiple times, searching, to no avail, for at least one applicable session. Then I posted on Facebook, asking the world: "When do you stop being an early career scholar?"
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.
Considerable research attention has been devoted to understanding the importance of knowledge creation in organisations over the last decade. Research suggests that leadership plays an important role in knowledge creation processes. Nonetheless, there is an important omission in knowledge creation research; namely, what are the underlying processes that underpin the implications of leadership for knowledge creation? This article aims to develop a theoretical model of leadership and knowledge creation by drawing on two contrasting leadership perspectives; that is transformational leadership and leader-member exchange (LMX), and the research on open-mindedness norms. Specifically, we argue why transformational leadership is related to knowledge creation, and also theorise how openmindedness norms and LMX quality serve as underlying mechanisms to underpin the effect of transformational leadership on knowledge creation. We conclude with a discussion of implications of the model for theory and practice, and also suggest potential avenues for future research.
Imagine you have completed a scholarly article, book or creative product that you intend as a contribution to your discipline. Who will evaluate your work, attest to its quality and determine whether it is published or exhibited? Who will review the work when you are up for tenure and promotion or contract renewal?
Now, in your mind’s eye, imagine a person who is likely to review the quality of your teaching for professional benchmarks.
Despite our best intentions every university president (or chancellor) eventually leaves the job. Most presidents are more than happy to retire into the sunset after a decade of fundraising, strategic visioning and crisis management. Others return to their research or are recruited elsewhere to lead another organisation.
Whatever the cause – and we must admit the cases where controversy cuts short the presidential term – at some point universities will find themselves in need of a new leader. The majority of institutions have detailed policies outlining the search process, but there are often bumps along the way.
Often the most challenging factor is the imperfect transfer of knowledge between committee and board members in charge of the search process. Fortunately, some recent research in the Canadian context highlights key techniques to facilitate a successful search process when choosing a new university president.
With the usual mixture of eagerness and trepidation, I waited for student evaluations. As I ended my second semester as an assistant professor last spring, I was acutely aware of the role these evaluations might play in my third-year review and, around the corner, my application for tenure.
My anxiety was tempered, however, by the fact that I had been hearing from my students throughout the semester and had a pretty good sense of how the course worked for them. And because I had my own goals for the course (integrating more student reflection and guiding a research paper with a new process), I was already able to start assessing how successful the course was and what I might try next time.
The Ontario government has indicated its intention to negotiate individual mandate statements with each of Ontario’s public postsecondary institutions and to amend funding formulas to focus resources on what each institution does best. These actions signal the government’s desire to pursue a policy of greater institutional differentiation within the Ontario public postsecondary system. The purpose of this paper is to inform and assist the development of a differentiation framework for the university sector by describing the diversity of Ontario universities on variables that other jurisdictions have used to differentiate their university systems. These variables are important to consider first because they are globally accepted, and therefore influence the way the rest of the world will judge the Ontario system and its quality.
Exactly two years ago, Liz Morrish had the unenviable task of explaining to a group of undergraduates why their favourite lecturer could no longer teach them.
There was no question of resorting to half-truths. Her absent colleague, who was on sick leave for stress, had briefed Morrish to talk about the relentless pressure on academic staff at universities.
“I told the students that there are research expectations – including things like ‘grant capture’ – with very low probabilities and yet real consequences for scholars who don’t meet them for whatever reason,” she recalls. “That’s not to mention other expectations like teaching load, marking and the rapidity of feedback,” she adds.
The students were “horrified” to learn that the work of lecturers was being judged by what Morrish calls “a totalising and de-contextualised set of metrics”, which made academics feel more like “players in some academic version of The Hunger Games , where capricious gamemakers change the rules all the time”.
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.”
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.
Last week, a student named Mary visited me during my office hours and presented me with an interesting dilemma. In one of her classes, a professor had distributed a study guide with a series of questions to help the students prepare for an upcoming exam. Mary, being the millennial student that she is, decided to upload the study guide into Google Docs and invite the rest of the class to contribute to the document. Students answered the study guide questions from each of their individual notes and then refined the answers from their peers.
Some students are more challenging to teach than others. They require pedagogical skills of a different and higher order. Sometimes it’s easier to sigh and just turn away. And that’s legitimate in the sense that students (indeed, people of all sorts) have to figure things out for themselves. But many of us were such “works in progress” when we were in college, and a teacher (or several of them) ended up being instrumental in moving us in more productive directions. It’s for that reason I’d like us to consider some of these challenging students, each one a unique individual, but many displaying the same counterproductive attitudes and actions. Descriptions of these students come much more easily than solutions to what’s holding them back. Said more directly, my goal here is to start this conversation and ask for your wisdom, insights, and experiences with students who are tough to teach.
Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes-
based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based
approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario
to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs
within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms
include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy
implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.
Keywords: internal quality assurance, external quality assurance, accountability, continuous improvement, learning outcomes
I want you personally to know I have hated every day in your course, and if I wasn’t forced to take this, I never would have. Anytime you mention this course to anyone who has ever taken it, they automatically know that you are a horrific teacher, and that they will hate every day in your class. Be a human being show some sympathy everyone hates this class and the material
so be realistic and work with people.
∼Excerpt from a student e-mail to a female online professor
Are student evaluations of teachers (SETs) biased against women, and what are the implications of this bias? Although not unanimous in their findings, previous studies found evidence of gender bias in SETs for both face-to-face and online courses. Specifically, evidence suggests that instructors who are women are rated lower than instructors who are men on SETs because of gender. The literature examining gender bias in SETs is vast and growing (Basow and Silberg 1987; Bray and Howard 1980; Miller and Chamberlin 2000), but only more recently have scholars focused on the potential of gender bias in the SETs of online
college courses. The use of online courses to measure gender bias offers a unique opportunity: to hold constant many factors about a student’s experience in a course that would vary in a face-to-face format.
Let’s start by acknowledging the truth: Course evaluations are incredibly biased, and aren’t an accurate measure of an instructor’s
effectiveness in the classroom. Too often, students’ perceptions of your appearance, demeanor, or pedigree prevent them from writing a fair and relevant review of your actual teaching. Yet despite dozens of studies demonstrating their unreliability, course evaluations continue to be used in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions by most colleges and universities.