Stupid.
This word was spoken triumphantly and repeatedly as self-speak by a talented pre-service, k-12 special education teacher during my course Library Resources for Children. Until I heard her say it several times through the semester, I hadn’t seen how one word can hold an entire teaching philosophy. I hadn’t considered how the power of that word multiplies when it takes
the form of self-speak. I hadn’t realized how much it scared me to think that that word might follow her into a k-12 classroom.
When I learned that my own teaching philosophy existed on the pinhead of a single word whenever I’ve thought it at myself, I needed to send this email to that amazing up-and-coming teacher:
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.
The free, non-credit courses aim to break down barriers and reduce social isolation.
Maurice Vernier, 52, has just finished six months in an addictions recovery program at the Ottawa Mission, a shelter for homeless men. Now living in a group home, he still has to undergo weekly breathalyser, blood and urine testing, but if he stays clean for one year he can move into his own apartment. And he’s almost there.
“I’ve been sober nine months now,” he says, ducking his head but smiling shyly. “I quit smoking four months ago, too. I really want to change everything.”
He says Discovery University is helping him do that. On this day, Mr. Vernier is sitting in the back row of a classroom in the University of Ottawa’s Tabaret Hall, where he is taking a course called Social Conflicts and Movements. A former pastor, he hasn’t set foot in a classroom since 1996 after graduating with a degree in theology from the University of Indiana.
Behind the doors of the University of Toronto’s Simcoe Hall, the school’s governing council voted in favour of passing a controversial policy that would mandate students who are experiencing a mental health crisis to take a leave of absence. The policy drew criticism from students who said it neglects to include the voice of those who are living with a mental health issue.
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.
This article explores for a broad audience the changing landscape of education in the digital age, the changing roles of teachers in a technology rich education system, and the skills, knowledge, values, and ways of thinking that teacher will need to have to support students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development in a digital learning environment.
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.
Abstract
“Teaching vs. research” as a global false dichotomy will be the focus of this study. A modest but very universal evidence is revealing itself in world university rankings in every year. It is not deniable that university rankings are not well taken by intellectuals. They contempt the ranking criteria for being inappropriate and irrelevant for the social, moral, and academic values prevalent at universities. They severely criticize the exploitation of competitive, market-driven potentials of universities. So many eminent scholars display their sense of humour by labelling these ranking ritual as “University Olympics” or as “horse race”. It is obvious that such a contest propagates the profitable positions of high-rank universities. Fortunately, egalitarian values still reign supreme in higher education. However, equality does not necessitate justice. Justice requires discrimination when needed. It is impossible to ignore the existence of collegial hierarchy. The diversity is a reality among the universities in every country. Neither the students nor the researchers are all alike. Their uneven aptitudes and proficiencies result with ordered categories. These and many other facts compel the ranking culture to endure despite the opposing criticisms mentioned before. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to omit the inter-institutional differences. Instead of resisting the comparative information one can exploit it for the common concern or at least to reinforce the curiosity. Times Higher Education (THE) World University Ranking summarizes annual performances of prominent universities all around the world
since 2012. Ranking criteria involves Teaching, Research, Citations International Outlook, and Industrial Income with differential weights. The purpose of this study is to display the correlations between the variables used as criteria to rank the world universities for 2018. It has been hypothesized that Pearson product-moment correlations would have been significantly high and positive. Moreover, the correlation between Teaching and Research will be the highest one among all
the other paired criteria in every different context.
Keywords: Higher education, teaching and research, university ranking.
Higher-education transformation, which is essential if colleges and universities are to survive in the 21st century, relies on transformative presidential leadership. Twenty-seven years ago, Judy B. Rosener, now a professor emerita in the business school at the University of California at Irvine, wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review that differentiated between "transactional" leadership and "transformative" leadership. The distinction is just as important today as it was then.
The department chair is a complex middle-management position located at the organizational fulcrum between faculty and senior administration. This qualitative study sought to develop a deeper understanding of chairs’ experi-ences when enacting their dual roles as managers and scholars. Using a ba-sic interpretative study design, we interviewed 10 department chairs from a medium-sized Canadian university. The participants identified three interre-lated areas of challenge: managing position, managing people, and managing self. We discuss the tensions and ambiguities inherent within these themes, along with specific recommendations for supporting this position.
Purpose of Study: Our aim was to better understand how students think, feel, and cope—their emotional adaptation—when making mistakes in the pursuit of classroom learning and how this might impact their relationships with peers. We explored the possibility of individual and contextual differences in students’ emotional adaptation dynamics and considered how they might uniquely coregulate students’ coping with making mistakes in classrooms.
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.
What would happen if you were to arrive to your classroom, unplug the devices, turn off the projector, and step away from the PowerPoint slides … just for the day?
What would you and your students do in class?
This was the challenge I presented to 100 faculty members who attended my session at the Teaching Professor Conference in St. Louis this past June. The title of the session was, “Using ‘Unplugged’ Flipped Learning Activities to Engage Students.” Our mission was to get “back to the basics” and share strategies to engage students without using technology.
he postelection climate has heightened concerns about managing incivility in instructional settings and society as a hole. In October, I wrote an essay for Inside Higher Ed that explored how understanding what constitutes lassroom incivility can help faculty members minimize its dangers while maximizing the teaching and learning pportunities it presents. In this article, I will describe how, in order to deal with the challenges that incivility poses, aculty members must move beyond seeking solutions to every case of incivility they might encounter -- an mpossible task. Instead, we must consider the contexts and larger forces driving civility issues in higher education. uch a macro-level approach can help faculty members understand incivility better and thereby manage it moreeffectively.
In the world of college composition, we spend a lot of time talking about how to teach writing — with as many opinions on that as there are instructors — but very little time talking about why we teach it.
Many professors take a philosophical approach, asserting that the purpose of teaching writing is to enrich students’ lives, promote self-exploration, or encourage political activism. Certainly all of those can be byproducts of a college writing course, but I would argue that none qualifies as its main purpose. The reason institutions offer — and often require — first-year composition is quite simple: so students learn how to communicate their expertise.
This fall I will again be the job-placement officer for my department — a position I have held more often than not for almost 20 years, in three different English departments. The role of the job-placement officer is to guide graduate students through the painstaking, drawn-out, and nerve-racking process of applying for positions in their field: from deciphering ads and preparing materials to interviewing with committees and, in the happy event, negotiating offers with chairs and deans.
In a recent Chronicle Review essay with the clickbait headline (which the authors did not write) "Why the University’s Insatiable Appetite Will Be Its Undoing," Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon, respectively an administrator and a professor at the University of Virginia, argue that the university should be more focused on what it does best — teaching and research — and less responsive to broad social pressures: "To save itself and to better serve its democratic purpose, the university needs to be not more but less reactive to public demands."
There are serious problems with arguments like this, much in the air right now, that blame universities for everything: overbuilding, high tuition, teaching too many subjects, incurring too much debt. Universities, according to Daniel and Wellmon, are simply doing too much all around.
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.
In the online class environment, students enjoy many advantages, such as increased scheduling flexibility, ability to balance work and school, classroom portability, and convenience. But there are potential shortcomings as well, including the lack of student-instructor interaction and a student not understanding the instructor’s expectations. A key mechanism to convey expectations while increasing student-instructor communication is relevant, timely, constructive, and balanced instructor feedback.
For 25 years, I have diligently, thoughtfully, and fastidiously written comments on my students’ essays. In my neatest hand, I’ve inscribed a running commentary down the margin of page after page, and at an essay’s conclusion I’ve summarized my thoughts in a paragraph or more. I’ve pointed out problems in the argument and explained basic mistakes of grammar and style. I’ve demonstrated my enthusiasm for a sharp idea and a well-hewn sentence. I’ve carefully moderated my tone, combining praise with correction. I’ve read papers that moved me to tears, literally, and others that left me frustrated — and tried to be sensitive in letting my students know that in either case.