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.
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
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.
Think back to your first few years of teaching. If you’re like most educators, you probably made your share of mistakes. To be sure, we all do things differently now than we did when we were first starting out. Thank goodness for that!
When Faculty Focus put out a call for articles for this special report on teaching mistakes, we really didn’t know what to expect. Would faculty be willing to share their earlier missteps for all to see? Would the articles all talk about the same common mistakes, or would the range of mistakes discussed truly reflect the complexities of teaching today?
Student evaluations of teaching, or SET, aren’t short on critics. Many professors and other experts say they’re unreliable -- they may hurt female and minority professors, for example. One recent metastudy also suggested that past analyses linking student achievement to strong evaluation scores are flawed, a mere “artifact of small-samplesized studies and publication bias.”
Now one of the authors of that metastudy is back for more, with a new analysis suggesting that SET ratings vary by course subject, with professors of math-related fields bearing the brunt of the effect.
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.
Among the trickiest decisions teachers make is whether to round up the final grade for a student who is just a few points shy
of a passing score.
Although some students need a “second lap” to master academic skills needed for later coursework, repeating courses makes it harder for students to progress toward a degree. Time is money (literally, in higher education), and when students are asked to spend more of both on a class they already took, they may get discouraged or drop out. This is a consequence we need
to take seriously, as nearly half of students do not complete a bachelor’s degree in four years.
So, how should we decide what to do?
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.
Canada is the second-largest country in the world. Ten million square kilometers stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans. While Canada’s wilderness is vast and diverse, most people in the country live in urban and suburban settings in regions
with dense populations.
Abstract
This paper presents an empirical analysis of the Ontario-led strategic mandate agreement (SMA) planning exercise. Focusing on the self-generated strategic mandates of five universities (McMaster, Ottawa, Queen’s, Toronto, and Western), we asked how universities responded to this exercise of strategic visioning? The answer to this question is important because the SMA process is unique in Ontario, and universities’ responses revealed aspects of their self understanding. We adopted an organizational theory approach to understand the structure and nature of universities as organizations and explored how
they might confront pressures for change. Analysis of the universities’ own proposed strategic mandates found elements of both conformity and striking differentiation, even within this sample of five research-intensive university SMAs. Directions for further work on this planning exercise and on higher education reform more generally are discussed.
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.
Currently, chances for English learners (ELs), emergent bilinguals who are in the process of developing grade-level academic English proficiency, to receive a college education are limited in the United States. Almost half of ELs do not attend any postsecondary education (PSE) after high school (Kanno & Cromley, 2013, 2015). Even among those who attend college, ELs are overrepresented in community colleges while being underrepresented in four-year institutions. On the face of it, this may all seem like an unfortunate but natural consequence of ELs limited English proficiency. However, scholars have argued that there are structural barriers that inhibit ELs PSE access, such as limited academic preparation in middle and high school due to their institutional status as ELs (Callahan, 2005; Callahan & Shifrer, 2016; Callahan, Wilkinson, & Muller, 2010; Kanno & Kangas, 2014; Umansky, 2016). Moreover, recent statistical analyses suggest that factors that have been widely accepted as influential in the general student population s college access the majority of whom are English-as-a-first-language (English L1) speakers may not
always be as significant for ELs (Kanno & Cromley, 2015; Nuñez & Sparks, 2012). In other words, we know that ELs
do not have the same levels of four-year-college access as English L1 speakers, but we do not know exactly why.
Longitudinal investigations of ELs transition to college are particularly scarce.
Experienced and new teachers shared what they learned in the spring about how to make mentoring work during the pandemic.
What makes a good introduction for a dissertation? Graduate students practice critiquing one another’s thesis chapters, but they rarely read the introductions — usually because those are written to meet a defense deadline. Which is why when you need to write one, you can find yourself with neither experience nor models.
At most institutions, faculty participate in some sort of annual review. A discussion of student evaluations is usually part of these conversations, and they aren’t always easy interactions. Sometimes the issue is the rating results—they aren’t high enough, maybe they dropped in one course, perhaps they have stayed the same for some time, or maybe there is some question about why they’re so high. Sometimes it’s what the academic leader concludes about the teaching based on a few negative student comments, or it could be the action the department chair recommends. And sometimes, it’s the faculty member who doesn’t know what to say or becomes defensive.
Student engagement and transcript data from the Center for Community College Student Engagement demonstrate the benefits of attending college full-time. Students who attend fulltime for even one semester have an edge—the full-time edge—that is reflected in their higher rates of engagement, completion of gateway courses, persistence, and credential attainment.
Given these findings, colleges should consider asking every student one straightforward question: “Is there any way you could attend college full-time, even for one semester?”
In Canada there are growing discussions concerning the role of publicly funded universities and the impact of academic research. The integration of neoliberal practices and market rationalities place pressure on universities to “go public” in order to demonstrate relevance and accountability. Researchers are encouraged or even required to engage the public through knowledge mobilization activities. Our study provides an empirical analysis of knowledge mobilization in order to understand its perceived impact on public criminology, and more broadly the production and dissemination of criminological research. We argue that the institutional shift toward knowledge mobilization is perceived as a tool of institutional governance to demonstrate organizational accountability that shapes the production and dissemination of criminological knowledge.
Overview
1.
Introduction
2.
Growth of International Student Enrollment in Ontario
3.
Analysis of First Year College Students
4.
Analysis of College Graduates
5.
Conclusionsand Policy Implications
"Plan for the students you actually have, not those you wish you had, or think you used to have, or think you used to be like."
So John N. Gardner, the creator of the term "first-year experience," advised college officials charged with making sure that the experience is a good one. In other words, be realistic; don’t expect too much of students.
That mind-set contrasts with the one evoked by the New Yorker writer David Denby in his new book, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives. The New York Times last week noted, "Lit Up is a refreshing lesson in what motivates students and why not to dumb down reading lists." Denby opens a window into the classrooms of several gifted high-school English teachers who assign Faulkner, Orwell, Frankl, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain — and whose love of reading is contagious to their teen students.
“Are you keeping us for the whole time today? Because I need to leave in 20 minutes,” asked a student with a baffled expression on his face. As I looked at him, I wanted so badly to explain: Of all the ways you could have chosen to introduce yourself on the first day of class, that was not the optimal one.