One of the reasons I love teaching is that each semester provides a fresh start: empty grade books, eager students. I also cherished this time when I was a student myself: poring over course syllabi, purchasing new textbooks, meeting my professors. Although I reside on eastern South Dakota’s frigid plains, the first day of class consistently brings me a warm feeling.
But once the newness of the semester fades, it’s not long before I casually share with a colleague something a student did or (more commonly) failed to do. This habit started in graduate school. Years ago, student shaming provided a humorous means of connecting with my fellow TAs: in my early 20s, commiserating over student issues felt normal, even cool. Perhaps, too, a case can be made that swapping stories of students’ shortcomings had little effect on our students themselves. They didn’t hear us laugh at their misspelled words or poorly constructed sentences. Yet, 10 years later, I’m haunted by the thought that I might
have spent more time complaining about my students than championing their success.
Students and graduates alike consider creating good jobs for young people a top priority for government. Right after affordability of post-secondary education, it is the top area they’d like government to prioritize.
Professor Arthur Gill Green traces his conversion to using open educational resources, or OER, back to a specific day in his introductory geography class in 2010. That day, after the lecture, he noticed students taking photos at the back of the classroom and wondered why.
It turns out they were photographing the textbook. “Two of us every week get digital pictures of the textbook pages, and one of us gets to take it home,” a nervous student confessed upon Dr. Green’s approach. He reassured the students he wasn’t upset, but the professor now sees the incident as a disruptive moment.
This exercise is key to enabling positive mindsets.
We are in a large classroom. There are at least 20 graduate students ranging in disciplines from engineering to health promotion to gender studies. The room is silent – you could hear a pin drop as each student stands at their own table, intently staring at the large flipchart paper covering it, a stack of colored markers adjacent. The graduate students move erratically –
periods of stillness are followed by bursts of furious writing and drawing. Someone peeking into the room might assume an exam is in progress as the room is quiet yet filled with intensity.
But no – this is reflective mapping.
Reflective mapping is a tool used at Simon Fraser University in the APEX workshop series to help graduate students recognize and gain confidence in their skillsets and experience. APEX was developed in 2013 as a partnership between SFU’s graduate studies unit & SFU’s career services unit. We intentionally created a program that infused constructivist notions of career to
help graduate students engage in self-discovery of their careers over time. A foundational piece is the reflective mapping activity where students engage in making sense of their career experiences, their interests, and their future goals.
The prevailing statistics on cheating are disheartening. Some put the rate at 75%. That means three out of every four students admit to some kind of academic dishonesty at some point during their higher education.
We all know that this is not a new phenomenon. Cheating is as old as higher education itself. Older, really, if you look outside the classroom. Classicists tell us that cheating scandals occurred even during the ancient Olympic Games.
So is there really a way to solve a problem with such ancient roots?
Earlier this semester, I received a complaint from an applicant who we had opted not to hire. In his email, which he also sent to a parade of others, he said that — given his obvious qualifications — he was both surprised and angered by the rejection. He was so angry, in fact, that he called for the hiring supervisor and several others to be terminated for incompetence.
Fair process is important to me so I looked into the situation to determine if there was anything to the conspiracy he described. I soon learned that the position was not going to be filled and the department was in the process of sending out notification letters to all the applicants. I sent our angry correspondent a brief message explaining all of that and expressing regret that we had inconvenienced him. The applicant — clearly needing to get in the last word — responded with a series of messages condemning my writing skills, integrity, and personal character.
WASHINGTON -- Harvey Mudd College has a problem. Over time it’s developed a “more is more” culture around faculty work that isn’t, well, working.
Lisa Sullivan, dean of the faculty, wants that to change, she said Thursday at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
“There’s a strong connection between excellence, rigor and pain,” Sullivan said during a session on data-driven strategies for reducing faculty workload. “You know you’ve got it right if you’re suffering a little bit and stressed. If you’re not at that point, then you’re probably not working hard enough.”
The most famous dictum of the science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke may be his Third Law: “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” And for most of us, the efficiency of 21st-century search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo and others — can be uncannily accurate. But when it comes to learning, instant gratification can be as much a bug as a feature.
Take high school students today. They have grown up using search engines and other web resources; they don’t need to understand how these tools work in order to use them. In fact, thanks to what’s called machine learning, search engines and other software can become more accurate — and even those who write the code for them may not be able to explain why.
Regardless of our subject area, we’ve all had moments where some students appear to hang on every word,
gobbling up our messages, images, graphs, and visuals with robust engagement. Within those very same classes,
however, there will be a degree of confusion, perplexed looks, or at worst, the blank stare! In my field of anatomical
education, like many other STEMM* disciplines, the almost ubiquitous use of multimedia and other increasingly
complex computer visualizations is an important piece of our pedagogic tool kit for the classroom, small group, or
even the one-on-one graduate-level chalk talk. Although a picture indeed does say a thousand words, the words that
each person hears, or more importantly, comprehends, will vary widely.
Research shows that women perform better than men on four out of five traits of effective leaders, says Øyvind Martinsen
One of the biggest differences between the experience I had as a student and the experience students have in my classroom has to do with assignments. When I was a student, assignments often had no discernible relationship to what we were doing in class. Oh, we would have to write about a text we read for class. But once the assignment was given out, we were generally on our own — there were no opportunities to work on it in class, to reflect on the skills the assignment asked us to practice, to share and workshop our ideas with our classmates.
The courses I teach are different. A sequence of major assignments form the backbone of the semester. Almost everything we do in class is explicitly linked to one or more of those assignments. We break them down into stages, work on them collaboratively, and discuss the challenges students might face along the way. Like many teachers, I design assignments not just to assess performance, but also to give students opportunities to practice and develop important skills.
About half of the refugees who have arrived in Canada from Syria have only a high-school education. Others lack proof that they completed higher education or must find a way to validate degrees from a country plunged into conflict. If they have their credentials, they must often upgrade them to meet the accreditation requirements of professional bodies here, or face working in jobs for which they are overqualified.
Are you on a first-name basis with your university president, provost, and deans?
Do they know your name?
This question may seem odd to those college and university employees who already enjoy a high degree of status
and security. Norms of faculty culture and shared governance have, in my understanding, have usually encouraged
a first-name familiarity among (tenure-track) faculty and institutional academic leaders. Faculty culture is one of flat
hierarchies. (Please share if you have experienced something different ).
Among staff, however (and maybe contingent faculty), being on a first-name basis with the president or provost is
not a given. (How students refer to campus leaders - and their professors - is a whole different question).
I work at a small and intimate liberal arts college where staff are on a first-name basis with all of the academic
leaders.
Here's an unsettling fact. One of Canada's most-renowned universities, with a student population the size of a small city, is chronically reliant on philanthropic donations to meet the demand for on-campus mental-health programs.
Let's think about that for a second.
Imagine having to scramble every year for donations simply to meet a minimum service standard. Now imagine being an institution without the luxury of a large rolodex of donors – relying only on tuition fees or internal funding.
The Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Peer Review highlights the powerful impact ‘transparency’ can have on learning for all students. One aspect of transparency is making obvious the intellectual practices involved in completing and evaluating a learning task. But making these processes visible for students is more easily said than done; we are experts in our fields for
the very reasons that our thinking and evaluating are automatic and subconscious. It’s hard to describe exactly what we do intellectually when we synthesize or integrate, critique, or create. Similarly, it’s difficult to articulate the differences between an assignment we score as an A and one to which we give a B. Thus, a challenge in achieving transparency is developing a
deep awareness of our own processes. Only then can we explicitly teach those thinking processes.
I got lucky this semester. I’m teaching two undergraduate courses, and in both of them, my students have bonded in a way that makes my job easier. They start talking to each other before class begins, and are still talking as they walk out the door. They are excited to share their views on the readings and participate eagerly in class discussions. It’s great.
I’m not under the illusion that I had much to do with creating that dynamic. Sometimes a group of students just clicks. But I recognize how a sense of community among students helps me — when students enjoy coming to class, when they trust each other, when they seem to genuinely like each other, they are more likely to learn more.
Real learning is a trip to an unknown destination. It involves revising your previous beliefs in ways that can be
difficult, frightening, or painful. A cohesive and supportive community can ease that process for students. Even when
faculty aren’t as lucky as I’ve been this term, we should be looking for ways to build such a community — one that
offers a safe environment for students to do the sort of experimentation and risk-taking that is necessary for learning
to occur.
Abstract
Most Canadian universities participate in the US-based National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) that measures various aspects of “student engagement.” The higher the level of engagement, the greater the probability of positive outcomes and the better the quality of the school. Maclean’s magazine publishes some of the results of these surveys. Institutions are ranked in terms of their scores on 10 engagement categories and four outcomes. The outcomes considered are how students in the first and senior years evaluate their overall experiences (satisfaction) and whether or not students would return to their campuses. Universities frequently use their scores on measures reported by Maclean’s in a self-congratulatory way. In this article, I deal with levels of satisfaction provided by Maclean’s. Based on multiple regression, I show that of the 10 engagement variables regarded as important by NSSE, at the institutional level, only one explains most of the variance in first-year student satisfaction. The others are of limited consequence. I also demonstrate, via a cluster analysis, that, rather than there
being a hierarchy of Canadian institutions as suggested by the way in which Maclean’s presents NSSE findings, Canadian universities can most adequately be divided into a limited number of different satisfaction clusters. Findings such as these might serve as a caution to parents and students who consider Maclean’s satisfaction rankings when assessing the merits of different universities. Overall, in terms of first-year satisfaction, the findings suggest more similarities than differences between and among Canadian universities.
Keywords: NSSE, Maclean’s, Canadian university rankings, student engagement, student satisfaction
Résumé
La plupart des universités canadiennes participent à l’Enquête nationale sur la participation étudiante/National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), qui est basée aux États-Unis. Plus le niveau de « participation étudiante » est élevé, plus la probabilité de résultats positifs est élevée, et plus l’école est considérée comme étant de bonne qualité. Le magazine Maclean’s publie certains des résultats de cette enquête. Les établissements y sont classés selon leur score dans dix catégories de « participation » et quatre résultats. Les résultats considérés sont la manière dont les étudiants de première et de dernière année évaluent leur expérience globale (satisfaction), et leur désir de retourner étudier au même endroit si c’était à refaire. Les universités utilisent fréquemment les résultats rapportés par Maclean’s à des fins d’autopromotion. Dans cet article, je me penche sur les niveaux de satisfaction présentés par Maclean’s. Sur la base d’une régression multiple, je montre que sur les dix variables de participation considérées comme importantes par la NSSE, au niveau des établissements, une seule explique la majeure partie de la variance en ce qui concerne la satisfaction des étudiants de première année. Les autres ont peu d’effet. Je démontre également, par le biais d’une analyse par grappe, qu’au lieu d’être hiérarchisées comme le suggère la façon de faire de Maclean’s avec les résultats de la NSSE, les universités canadiennes peuvent être divisées de façon plus adéquate en un nombre limité de grappes de satisfaction. Ces découvertes peuvent servir de mise en garde aux parents et aux étudiants qui considèrent les classements de Maclean’s pour comparer les universités. Globalement, en ce qui a trait à la satisfaction des étudiants de première année, elles suggèrent qu’il y a plus de ressemblances que de différences entre les universités canadiennes.
Mots-clés : enquête nationale sur la participation étudiante, Maclean’s, classement des universités canadiennes, participation
étudiante, satisfaction des étudiants
For non-traditional students who are working adults or are returning to school years later, the transition to college can be intimidating. Several of my students have expressed how hard it is to learn new concepts. Many feel their minds aren’t as “sharp” as they were the first time they attended college. Others talk about the stress that comes with having to balance family and work responsibilities with their course requirements. On more than one occasion, I have had to talk a student out of quitting a program because of one or all of these factors.
In higher education, the concept of good is elusive. Do we know good when we see it? For example, while there is general agreement that community college graduation rates are too low, there is not yet consensus about what would constitute a good, or an outstanding, graduation rate.
At community colleges, benchmarking and benchmarks are about understanding the facts and using them to assess performance, make appropriate comparisons, establish baselines, set goals, and monitor progress — all in the service of improving practice so more students succeed.
As part of this practice, the Center for Community College Student Engagement encourages colleges to use data that can support reasonable comparisons both within and across institutions and to have broad, campuswide conversations to address key follow-up questions: What are our priorities here, in this college? In what areas do we need and wish to excel? And how good is good enough — for our students, our college, our community?
Ice crystallized on the windshield, then a tire burst on the way to school, making you late. By the time you arrived, the computer (with the video clip and presentation cued up) froze. Minutes later, Jason pulled the fire alarm while you tried to catch up on parent emails. During lunch duty, a student was punched in the nose. Your nose is stuffy while you explain to the principal right before an IEP meeting why your plans haven't been submitted yet. The day trudges along. . . At last, the final bell rings, and in your first quiet moment of the day, thoughts of leaving the teaching profession suddenly seem, well, right.
It's that moment when you want to say, "I quit!"