With what confidence can we guarantee that graduates are ready for the challenges of 21st-century life, work, and citizenship? For years I have worked with district leaders to help principals, teacher coaches, and so many other educators build credibility, coherence, and community around their education transformation efforts. District leaders must manage a myriad of priorities, and I often tell them that the best first step they can take to ensure our students’ success in life, work, and citizenship is to develop and adopt a graduate profile.
How do you teach the same concepts and skills to students with diverse abilities and interests? Different learning profiles? And how do you do that in real classrooms, with limited time to plan?
I remember the first time I tackled the controversial subject of students as customers. It was in an in-house newsletter, well before the advent of the Internet and e-mail. Even so, I had numerous phone calls, memos, encounters on campus, and discussions about it in every activity the teaching center sponsored for the next year. I hadn’t even taken a side; I had simply listed arguments for both sides. But, as far as the faculty were concerned then and pretty much since, there aren’t two sides. Students are not customers. Tuition dollars do not buy grades. Education does not come with a money-back guarantee. And students don’t get to choose what they learn—well, they do, but if they don’t choose to learn what we require, the consequences are costly.
As spring semester winds down on college and university campuses across the country, faculty thoughts often turn to what we’re doing over the summer — research, course redesign, family vacations, recharging, perhaps teaching a course or two. But then academic reality rears its head and our thoughts are forced from their Summer Happy Place to somewhere far more mundane: The Assessment Mire.
If where you teach is anything like my university, in addition to the assessment work we do for our own courses (grading piles of student essays, projects, and tests) there is often a layer of institutional assessment on top of that. We use various assignments to assess the outcomes in our institution’s core curriculum, for example, and then we aggregate the data to see how students across the university are doing with the core’s various dimensions.
There is a general misconception that our beliefs are the cause of our actions. Often it is the other way around.
Just like the fox, people will tell themselves a story to justify their actions. This helps to protect their ego during failure or indicate why they committed a certain action. Teachers need to place students in situations where they can persuade themselves that they were intrinsically motivated to behave a certain way or to carry out certain actions.
Reporting mandates, new leeway in using federal aid, and the chance to make it a school-quality indicator all raise the issue’s profile.
Purpose: The aim of this study is to explore if straight-line assimilation, segmented assimilation, and immigrant optimism
hypotheses explain the relationships between schools, justice, and immigration, as well as the potential role of gender, race,
and ethnicity in immigrant youth perceptions of justice, fairness, and order.
Engagement in a continuous, systematic, and well-documented student learning assessment process has been gaining importance throughout higher education. Indeed, implementation of such a process is typically a requirement for obtaining and maintaining accreditation. Because faculty need to embrace learning assessment in order for it to be successful, any misconceptions about the nature of assessment need to be dispelled. One way to accomplish that is to “rebrand” (i.e., change perceptions) the entire process.
Questions are a common way for teachers to check for understanding, right? The answer we’re looking for is "yes." Who hasn't questioned a group of students to determine whether or not they understood the content? Unfortunately, not all questions are created equally. We propose four over-arching questions that can be used to scaffold students' thinking about complex texts. You can tailor these questions to any book that your students are reading:
What does the text say?
How does the text work?
What does the text mean?
What does the text inspire you to do?
Colleges are under increasing pressure to retain their students. Federal and state officials are demanding that those who enter their public institutions— especially students from underrepresented groups— earn a degree. Over two dozen states disburse some state funding on how many students an institution graduates, rather than how many it enrolls. Students and families are more anxious than ever before about crossing the degree finish line, as the financial burden of paying for college has increased significantly in recent years. And retaining students is becoming more crucial to the university bottom line. As recruiting and educating students becomes increasingly expensive, colleges hope to balance the resources they use to recruit students with revenue generated when those students are retained.
If there’s a perfect grading system, it has yet to be discovered. This post is about point systems—not because they’re the best or the worst but because they’re widely used. It is precisely because they are so prevalent that we need to think about how they affect learning.
Six months after the Ontario government announced a new funding model for the province’s universities, questions are being raised about whether the framework is flexible enough to respond to the challenges facing both Ontario’s more remote regions as well as its booming Greater Toronto Area.
Currently, universities and colleges receive funds tied to their enrolment. Under the new plan, institutions will have to keep enrolment within several percentage points of a target that is now being negotiated between each school and the provincial government. Funding will not be available for enrolment growth beyond that target.
After years of taking orders, you finally get to issue them in your first administrative role. You will have the freedom to make your own plans, set your own direction, and surround yourself with people who share your work ethic and point of view. Life is good!
Many people who work at colleges and universities have expressed concern about the new administration’s executive orders and policies regarding immigration, as well as the reactions of international students and scholars to it. However, more fundamental issues related to the internationalization of higher education that should not be ignored have been emerging for some time.
In this age of global connectivity, internationalization in academe has become an increasingly normal practice. That has proven to be profitable for institutions and beneficial for the career prospects of international students. But even before the recent political turmoil and upheaval, not all has been as good as it may have seemed. Those directly involved in the process -- domestic students, international students and professors -- have been voicing dissatisfaction.
Well here it is already — the end of my first year of full-time teaching. With 25 years of experience in the music industry, and 20 of those years teaching music as an adjunct, I’d felt well-prepared for academia. In fact, I was raring to go.
Last fall, as I walked across campus during the first week of classes, I felt the excitement of being part of the whole enterprise. I traveled the hallowed halls, bustling with the commotion of students. I sat in faculty meetings and glanced around at my new colleagues, the collective braintrust charged with developing, monitoring, scrutinizing, and ultimately teaching the curriculum. I met with my classes for the first time, and in between, retired to the solitude of my very first faculty office. It felt exhilarating. It was what I’d been preparing for all those years in grad school.
The present study used meta-analytic methodology to synthesize research on the relationship between student ratings of instruction and student achievement. The data for the meta-analysis came from 41 independent validity studies reporting on 68 separate multisection courses relating student ratings to student achievement. The average correlation between an overall instructor rating and student achievement was .43; the average correlation between an overall course rating and student achievement was .47. While large effect sizes were also found for more specific rating dimensions such as Skill and Structure, other dimensions showed more modest relationships with student achievement. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that rating/achievement correlations were larger for full-time faculty when students knew their final grades before rating instructors and when an external evaluator graded students’ achievement tests. The results of the meta-analysis provide strong support for the validity of student ratings as measures of teaching effectiveness.
“FBI Insider: Clinton Emails Linked to Political Pedophile Sex Ring,” declared a blog post just days before the U.S. presidential election.
And earlier this year [2017], an online headline blasted: “BOMBSHELL: Trump and Putin Spotted at Swiss Resort Prior to Election.”
There was only one problem. Neither was true at all. Even the sources were suspect.
The headlines, it turned out, were part of the onslaught of fake news that has proliferated. But for Texas A&M senior Ishanee Chanda, the task of discerning between fool’s gold and gold was a no brainer.
"Critical thinking has allowed me to look at the most recent election and the phenomenon of `fake news' with a careful eye," says Ishanee Chanda
You heard about it happening to others. Perhaps the victim was a graduate student in a seminar, or an administrator at a high-stakes meeting. Maybe it was a young scholar at an academic conference where passions for a subject tend to run high and unbridled egos may roam. But you never really thought it would happen to you — until it does. Blindsided. Maybe the full impact didn't sink in until after the fact: You’d been smacked by an academic sneer.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says her policy views are "very aligned" with President Trump's, including the belief that four-year colleges are not serving students well.
Internships, field placements, co‐op and other forms of postsecondary work‐integrated learning (WIL) help Ontario college and university students gain practical work experience, enhance their résumés, improve employability skills and determine their fit with a potential career, according to a new study from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO).