Paré, D. E., Collimore, L.-M., Joordens, S., Rolheiser, C., Brym, R., & Gini-Newman, G.
(2015). Put Students’ Minds Together and their Hearts Will Follow: Building a Sense of Community in Large-Sized Classes via Peer- and Self-Assessment – Appendix. Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.
Conventional wisdom suggests that teaching students how to be creative is a task best left to the arts and design. But faculty members from other fields are increasingly seeing the benefits of cultivating in their students the kinds of integrative and lateral thinking that creativity can foster. Two examples from psychology came to us in response to our recent request for your thoughts on this topic.
One of the most basic principles in education is backward curriculum design. This approach involves beginning with the end in mind. Moore (2015) stated that the backward design model “centers on the idea that the design process should begin with identifying the desired outcomes and then work backwards to develop instruction rather than the traditional approach, which is to define what topics need to be covered” (p.34). It can be tempting to utilize the traditional approach of creating learning activities based on the topics selected for a course. However, this does not challenge the educator to think about the concepts in new
and creative ways. Backward curriculum design has numerous benefits that educators should consider, but we must think about this process in new and insightful ways.
There is currently increasing pressure on universities to demonstrate how they contribute to their host societies. In the 21st century knowledge society, universities are seen as providing the key raw materials for economic growth, creating knowledge through research activities.
A new ideal-type of university has emerged, the 'world-class university' bringing together the best talents, researchers and facilities to drive national economic development. A wide range of countries – from France to China, from Germany to Saudi Arabia – have embraced this model and selectively rewarded universities conforming to that ideal.
But alongside pressure to be 'world class', universities are also under pressure from increasing student numbers unmatched by resource growth. Universities have responded by increasing efficiency of student delivery, reducing drop-out rates, increasing class sizes and standardising teaching activities.
Maybe you have colleagues who are the first to leap onto technology trends. No doubt you’ve heard them reminiscing about all the stuff they started using before anyone else — class Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, in-class polling. Or maybe you’re a member of Club Early Adopter yourself?
I am, or at least I’ve aspired to be. (Have I told you about the web pages I put up for my class back in ’95?) Back in the day, those of us in the club had to kludge together solutions using tech that wasn’t made for teaching. Today, however, you have your pick of hundreds of products, custom-built for education or even for specific disciplines. Furthermore, many of the earliest technologies — think: web pages and blogs — are now something truly anyone can use, no matter your level of technical expertise.
Every March, as faculty interview season gets underway at two-year colleges, I find myself thinking back on some of the memorable train wrecks I’ve witnessed.
There was the extremely promising — not to mention sharply dressed — candidate who, when asked why he was interested in this particular job, replied, "If you’re implying that I don’t really want to teach at a community college, I assure you, you’re mistaken. I’m not wearing this Brooks Brothers suit for nothing."
We professors like to, well, profess. We aren’t always great at listening. Yet when we move into administration, practically every hiring profile calls for a “great listener.” And, accordingly, almost anyone who seeks a leadership post in higher education lists “strong listening skills” as one of their signature attributes.
Abstract
Researchers are under increasing pressure to disseminate research more widely with non-academic audiences (efforts we call knowledge mobilization, KMb) and to articulate the value of their research beyond academia to broader society. This study surveyed SSHRC-funded education researchers to explore how universities are supporting researchers with these new demands. Overall, the study found that there are few supports available to researchers to assist them in KMb efforts. Even where supports do exist, they are not heavily accessed by researchers. Researchers spend less than 10% of their time on
non-academic outreach. Researchers who do the highest levels of academic publishing also report the highest levels of non-academic dissemination. These findings suggest many opportunities to make improvements at individual and institutional levels. We recommend (a) leveraging intermediaries to improve KMb, (b) creating institutionally embedded KMb capacity, and (c) having funders take a leadership role in training and capacity-building.
Don’t overlook the benefits of working in a non-faculty role at a university.
It was a chilly December morning at work. I was sipping on my first coffee of the day, reading my emails and making my plans for the day, when an email notified me that one of my publications had been referenced. No way! It had been almost eight years to the day since I defended my PhD thesis and I had long stopped adding research publications to my resumé.
Still, it was exciting to find out someone referenced my research.
As a result of the new coronavirus epidemic most universities in China have encouraged their professors to apply online teaching instead of in-class teaching and this is likely to continue for the indefinite future. Some professors and students have complained about problems with online teaching and lack confidence in its effectiveness, but many are still new to the whole online experience. Here are some of the problems and some potential solutions.
Study finds gender of instructors influences evaluations they receive, even if they have fooled students (in an online course) about whether they are men or women.
Your students have questions, but they rarely ask them—especially at the beginning of the semester. They feel awkward or embarrassed, or maybe it’s just inertia. Whatever the cause, the vast majority of student questions go unasked. For teachers, this is wildly frustrating because we can’t answer the questions they don’t ask (though some questions can be anticipated). In many cases, the unasked questions represent anxieties and uncertainties that negatively affect students’ performance in class and inhibits their learning. This is a particular problem in the sophomore composition class I teach. It has a reputation as a difficult class, so many students arrive intimidated and nervous.
Many of us have stress dreams that surface over and over in our lives. Here is one of mine: I’m driving. It gets dark suddenly. I turn on my lights, but I still can’t see. I turn on my bright lights, but that does not help. I say to myself, "This is too dangerous," as I pull over to the side of the road. Because the dream happens only when I am faced with a situation that has no obvious answer, I do not need an expert interpreter to tell me that my subconscious is warning me to pause until I have better information about the path forward.
Community colleges are not monolithic. Each has its own culture, its own array of personalities, and its own way of doing things. Yet my experience — more than three decades at five different two-year colleges in four states — suggests that most of them have
a great deal in common, too. With that in mind, if you’re new to full-time teaching in the community-college sector, here’s what you can probably expect as you start work this fall.
The first thing I thought, once I got the good news that I’d received tenure, was how ill-prepared I’d been for the process. Now that I am approaching my one-year "tenure-versary," I realize how equally unprepared I was for being a tenured professor.
For many months, I was so focused on the details of achieving tenure that I didn’t think enough about what the promotion would mean — specifically, how it would change my daily workload, my job expectations, my work-life balancing act.
Writing and teaching are the two great common denominators of academic life (OK, the departmental meeting is a third). With few exceptions, no matter your discipline, you have to teach, and you have to write.
I co-teach a writing course for graduate students at the University of Iowa, and I’ve been surprised at how often discussions of writing evolve into discussions of teaching. It makes sense: Both involve translating ideas so they can be understood by other people. As we ease out of one semester and start planning for the next, I’ve been thinking about how we might apply writing strategies to our course planning.
Particularly now, when you have several weeks until the next semester starts, it’s worth thinking of your courses like you think about your writing — as the result of a series of drafts. You don’t expect to sit down and write a journal article in one go. Why would creating a course be any different? Acknowledge that drafting and revision are essential to any creative project and give yourself plenty of time.
It’s traditional graduation season, so it’s also the time for articles about the supposed gap between what colleges claim baccalaureate graduates know and can do and what the corporate, nonprofit and government sectors claim they need them to know and do. Higher education’s panicked response to those critiques has too often been to chase rabbits. Unfortunately, the rabbits are usually not innovative, creative curricular redesigns but rather a doubling down on increasingly less relevant and arbitrary collections of credits we call “degrees.”
Branding is the exercise of summarizing an organization’s culture to attract a particular type of employee, collaborator or funder.
Like it or not, branding and self-promotion are an integral part of science. Our training might focus primarily on how to do science, but that isn’t enough; we also need to promote ourselves and our findings in order to persuade others to fund and collaborate on our research, and to highlight the value of our discoveries so we can broaden their reach.
It’s always been this way. The financial support of scientific discovery was historically provided by wealthy patrons who typically backed an individual or a handful of scientists who had to market themselves to get attention (The financial cost of doing science). These days, the role of individual patron has been assumed by diverse government, philanthropic, and private sources of grant funding, and it’s our peers who we have to impress, via the peer review process.
Interprofessional education (IPE) is a growing focus for educators in health professional academic programs. Recommendations to successfully imple-ment IPE are emerging in the literature, but there remains a dearth of evidence informing the bigger challenges of sustainability and scalability. Transforma-tion to interprofessional education for collaborative person-centred practice (IECPCP) is complex and requires “harmonization of motivations” within and between academia, governments, healthcare delivery sectors, and consumers. The main lesson learned at the University of Manitoba was the value of using a formal implementation framework to guide its work. This framework identi-fies key factors that must be addressed at the micro, meso, and macro levels and emphasizes that interventions occurring only at any single level will likely not lead to sustainable change. This paper describes lessons learned when us-ing the framework and offers recommendations to support other institutions in their efforts to enable the roll out and integration of IECPCP.
Flipped and active learning truly are a better way for students to learn, but they also may be a fast track to instructor burnout.