The book opens by underscoring the importance of teacher workload in education and its history of problems related to inequality of work assignments and its effect on student learning. Other chapters give special attention to how workload has been allocated historically. Best practices regarding teacher workload assignments are detailed in relation to best student learning outcomes. How to measure teacher workload and make necessary load adjustments are set forth in various strategies and innovative programming.
The question being asked with increasing regularity is, Just what do faculty members do? Studies of faculty workload have been commisioned in state after state. Taken together, the studies indicate that college faculty members are working harder than ever but are probably teaching less and are almost certainly having less contact with students, particularly undergraduates. This volume of New Directions for Institutional Research explores how the public discourse about faculty work might be improved and suggests how colleges and universities might document that work in a fashion that not only more faithfully describes what faculty do but also allows for reports that are more comprehensive and useful. This is the 83rd issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Institutional Research. For more information on the series, please see the Journals and Periodicals page.
Kinds of faculty workload data that can be obtained from college and faculty reports are examined, along with potential problems in workload studies. A main research concern is deciding which faculty activities should be considered as workload. Types of data that are sometimes used in colleges' faculty workload formulas concern student credit hours, faculty contract hours, and student/faculty ratios. However, these measures ignore noninstructional time and they assume that the same amount of time is involved in teaching all three-credit courses, regardless of discipline and course level. Faculty reports on their activities are another information source, using interviews, diaries, or work samples. Possible research problems include a biased sample, the time of survey administration, the time period covered, time allocation, and study reliability and validity. Factors that can affect workload data include demographic factors (discipline, country, institution); scheduling factors (class size, course level, course type, preparations); and individual factors (rank, gender, and individual differences). Ten recommendations are offered concerning such issues as the sponsorship of the study, study methods, the effect of teaching load on scholarship, and the relationship between teaching load and teaching effectiveness. (SW)
The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.
The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K-12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative. CONTRIBUTORS: Aaron Blackwelder Susan D. Blum Arthur Chiaravalli Gary Chu Cathy N. Davidson Laura Gibbs Christina Katopodis Joy Kirr Alfie Kohn Christopher Riesbeck Starr Sackstein Marcus Schultz-Bergin Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh Jesse Stommel John Warner
Frustrated by her students’ performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter’s problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experience at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students. In "I Love Learning; I Hate School," Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding. Blum concludes that the dominant forms of higher education do not match the myriad forms of learning that help students—people in general—master meaningful and worthwhile skills and knowledge. Students are capable of learning huge amounts, but the ways higher education is structured often leads them to fail to learn. More than that, it leads to ill effects. In this critique of higher education, infused with anthropological insights, Blum explains why so much is going wrong and offers suggestions for how to bring classroom learning more in line with appropriate forms of engagement. She challenges our system of education and argues for a "reintegration of learning with life."
The Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Project: A Framework for Success, Second Edition focuses on assisting students and faculty with creating a system for the completion of the DNP scholarly project.
Performance-based assessments have become a critical component of every teacher education program. Such assessments allow teacher candidates to demonstrate their content and pedagogical knowledge, skills, and dispositions in an authentic setting. Evaluating Teacher Education Programs through Performance-Based Assessments analyzes and discusses the theory and concepts behind teacher education program evaluation using assessment tools such as lesson plans, classroom artifacts, student work examples, and video recordings of lessons. Emphasizing critical real-world examples and empirically-based studies, this research-based publication is an ideal reference source for university administrators, teacher educators, K-12 leaders, and graduate students in the field of education.
