Some scholars have questioned academe’s reliance on letters of recommendation, saying they’re onerous for the professors writing them or speak more about connections to “big-name” scholars than substance, or both.
A recent study explores another concern about letters of recommendation: whether they’re biased against the women they’re supposed to help. The short answer is yes.
Teacher education evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study docyments a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.
For nearly two-thirds of my 30-year career in higher education, I have served as a middle manager of one sort or another: department chair, dean, program director. For the other third, I have been middle-managed.
Of course, even as a low-level administrator, I had plenty of people above me telling me what to do. I also had people below me who, given the chance, gladly told me what to do.
The point is: I know what it’s like to be on both sides of that transaction. Specifically, I know firsthand how department chairs can make faculty lives easier, and I also know what they do (all too often) that makes faculty lives more difficult (dare I say "miserable"?). Accordingly, I’d like to identify — for the benefit of new and future department chairs especially — what I consider the five biggest morale killers for college faculty.
Garrison Institute looks a little like Hogwarts. The retreat center is housed in a former monastery amid tranquil green hills overlooking the Hudson River, 60 miles north and a world away from New York City.
Inside the airy chapel on a recent summer afternoon, about 35 educators from the U.S. and at least five foreign countries are seated quietly, shoes off.
"Just notice your breath, the sensation of your air coming in, going out," says Christa Turksma, a Dutch woman dressed all in white with silver-white hair. She's one of the co-founders of Cultivating Awareness and Resilience for Educators, or CARE for Teachers.
Cheerful and helpful workers are beloved by their bosses, and just about everyone else, really. Enthusiastic optimists make for great colleagues, rarely cause problems, and can always be counted on.
But they may not necessarily make the best employees, says Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist and Wharton professor.
Speaking in Chicago at the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management, Grant said he separates workers along two axes: givers and takers, and agreeable and disagreeable. Givers share of themselves and make their colleagues better, while takers are selfish and focused only on their own interests. The agreeable/disagreeable spectrum is what it sounds like: some workers are friendly, some are grouchy.
A substantial body of research indicates that a teacher’s identity is an essential aspect of their professional practice. As this body of research grows, researchers have increasingly sought to investigate the nature of pre-service teacher identities. This paper reports on a study that examined identities in the context of a pre-service cohort’s online discussion group. By examining the group, this study attempted to address a gap in research knowledge, as research to this date has been unable to investigate pre-service teacher identities in non-course-endorsed or instructor-occupied spaces. A thematic and quantitative analysis of online postings by and interviews with group members provided an insight into how identities performed and related to one another within the online discussion group. The findings indicate that one category of identities emerged from a commitment to the social expectations and values of the group, whilst another emerged out of a personal resistance towards the social norms of group participation and involvement. This study may be useful for teacher educators deliberating the use of online spaces to support pre-service teacher identity development.
Keywords: online discussion group; pre-service teacher identity; teacher education; thematic analysis
How can you make sure your online students take tests without cheating? It’s one of the most-frequent questions asked by new online instructors and even some experienced ones. The short answer: You can’t.
You might be tempted to join the “arms race” in cheating-prevention tools, or to adopt punitive approaches such as proctored online exams and time limits for online tests. But the reality is, students will always find new and creative ways to get around your policing
efforts. So what to do?
Résumé
Plusieurs travaux soulignent des difficultés particulières auxquelles certains titulaires d’un doctorat sont confrontés sur le marché du travail en dehors du milieu universitaire. Une des principales raisons de ces difficultés serait la méconnaissance ou l’inadéquation des acquis de la formation doctorale en ce qui concerne les compétences recherchées par les organisations. Or, en dehors de données statistiques, peu de travaux nous renseignent sur les perceptions que les différents acteurs ont de ces compétences. Cet article apporte une contribution dans ce sens. Il est basé sur les résultats d’une recherche mixte à devis séquentiel. La première étape a consisté en une étude qualitative par entretiens semi-directifs réalisés auprès de 85 diplômés du doctorat en emploi et 21 responsables d’organisations. Les résultats de cette étude, dont les données ont été traitées par la méthode Alceste, ont servi à la conception d’une échelle de 45 items sur les compétences des titulaires d’un doctorat. Cette échelle a été mesurée lors de deux enquêtes par questionnaire auxquelles ont répondu 2139 diplômés du doctorat en emploi et 215 responsables d’organisations. Des analyses descriptives de comparaison de moyennes standardisées (d de Cohen) mettent en évidence des points de convergence qui montrent que la formation doctorale pourrait constituer un
atout pour le développement des compétences du futur, notamment celles difficiles à automatiser : la gestion de la complexité, la créativité, l’esprit critique.
Mots-clés : doctorat, transition, compétences, compétences du futur, intentionnalité, employabilité
Abstract
A number of studies point to particular challenges that some PhD graduates face in the labour market outside of academia. One of the main reasons for these difficulties is said to be a lack of knowledge or inadequacy of what doctoral graduates have acquired in terms of the skills sought by employers. However, apart from statistical data, there is little work that tells us about the perceptions that the various groups and individuals involved have of these skills. This article makes a contribution in this direction. It is based on the results of a sequential mixed methods study. The first stage consisted of a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews of 85 employed PhD graduates and 21 organizational leaders. The results of this study, whose data were processed using the Alceste method, were used to design a 45-item scale on the skills of doctoral graduates. This scale was measured in two questionnaire surveys completed by 2,139 employed doctoral graduates and 215 organizational leaders. Descriptive analyses comparing standardized averages (Cohen's d) highlight points of convergence that show that doctoral training could be an asset for the development of future skills, especially those that are difficult to automate: complexity management, creativity, critical thinking.eywords: PhD, transition, skills, future skills, intentionality, employability
aculty dread the grade appeal; anxiety prevails until the whole process is complete. Much has been written about ow to avoid such instances, but the potentially subjective assessments of written essays or clinical skills can be specially troublesome. One common cause of grade appeals is grading ambiguity in which the student and faculty ember disagree on the interpretation of required content. Another cause is inequity, whereby the student feels thers may have gotten more credit for very similar work or content (Hummel 2010). In the health-care field specially, these disagreements over clinical-skills assessments can actually result in student dismissal from the program and may lead to lawsuits.
The coronavirus has colleges and universities swinging into action to move courses online. In the coming weeks, we’ll find out just how prepared (or not) academe is to do this on a large scale. Those of us in online teaching and educational technology have moved quickly to help, too, and it’s astonishing how many helpful resources have already been pulled together.
Even just a few weeks into the crisis, and really only a few days since class cancellations started to become a reality, there are top-quality guides free for the taking, created by people who really know their stuff. I will make no claim to have read all or even a fraction of them, but there are several that are clearly share-worthy:
“How am I supposed to mentor colleagues whose roles in the future may not look at all like what I have done?”
The question came from a HERS Institute alumna who had been asked to be part of a mentoring program on her campus. The goals were to encourage strong performance and to foster more satisfaction about working at the university among younger members of her department. She didn’t want to seem unhelpful, but she was feeling unprepared.
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.
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.
The robots are coming. Future-gazers have been making that prediction at least since Alan Turing speculated in 1950 about the possibility of a machine that could fool an interlocutor into believing that they were talking to another person.
But the imminent arrival on our roads of self-driving cars (see the article “How do we decide what is right? The ethicist’s view”, below) has brought home to many people that the kinds of artificially intelligent machines long imagined by science fiction writers and visionary scientists
are finally being realised.
Research shows when people are curious about something, not only do they learn better, they learn more. It should come as no
surprise, then, that inquiry-based learning is proving to be an effective education model. In fact, one research study found inquiry-based learning produces increases in affective and cognitive outcomes.
It had happened before, sitting at the computer, working on a syllabus, again, fluctuating between excitement about a new course and a vague sense that life itself was being sucked out of me one sterile byte at a time. I was fighting boredom. And this was supposed to interest students? I tried to imagine it igniting their curiosity, but instead I saw them staring at it with the
enthusiasm saved for the fine print on a life insurance policy. But they must read it. It is their life insurance policy for a future full of knowledge and wisdom! It defines how we’re going to relate! As I sat there writing my syllabus I had a vision of the Ferris Bueller video of the professor droning on and on while asking for input: “Anyone? Anyone?” That was not where I wanted to go. I had to stop and rethink what I was doing.
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.
The old expression that you never have a second chance to make a first impression is certainly true in the classroom. Early in my career, I tried several first-day-of-class strategies, ranging from briefly introducing the course and dismissing students early to spending the entire time reviewing policies and procedures, but I began to feel that I was missing an important opportunity. Students are never more attentive than they are on the first day of class, when they’re eager to determine what kind of professor they’re dealing with, and although it is tempting to delay the real work of teaching and learning until the class list has stabilized, it can be difficult to change even the subtle norms that are established during this initial class. Several years ago, I tried a new approach, and I’ve been using it with great success ever
since.
In 2012, Mohawk College solicited the support of the Education Policy Research Initiative (EPRI) to collect and use administrative and other data on students held by Mohawk as part of a broad initiative to improve student success based on the principle of evidence‐based decision making.
The first project involved analyses to better understand student retention at Mohawk using both descriptive and statistical modelling approaches. This work led to the development of a predictive model to identify students at risk of leaving college early.
In 2015, Mohawk and EPRI applied to and became part of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario’s (HEQCO) Access and Retention Consortium (ARC) to undertake a project that would build on this earlier work. The purpose was to update, refine and extensively test the predictive model, which would then be used to inform and assess a set of alternative advising interventions put in place for students entering Mohawk College in Fall 2015.
Most political discussion of higher education these days focuses on the return on investment to individuals, rather than on the contributions that colleges and universities make to society broadly. So it wouldn't be surprising to find that many Americans don't put much stock in the "public good" arguments on which much government funding of higher education was premised.
But a new survey finds that most Americans continue to support government funding of higher education and to recognize that colleges and universities play many roles beyond helping them (or their children) get a good job or other personal return on investment.