Higher Education Observer

This rather simplistic article/listicle may have some wisdom: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/five-steps-to-become-a-better-writer?utm_source=pocket-newtab As obvious as it sounds, one cannot write better unless one writes A LOT. Too many people want to write the minimal amount. It is assumed that academics (or those who teach in college--not always exactly the same group) do write a great deal, publish a great deal, etc. Actually, most college instructors and professors don't write that much. We publish either because we have to to keep our positions; our positions are primarily about publishing; or we've found a way or angle that ensures we can get published.  Sometimes it's what the trends are, sometimes it's particular personal strengths. Getting an article or book chapter published is darned hard work, and most of us avoid it if we can. Most colleges are teaching institutions and don't expect the publishing to a high degree. Why do I say that? Because ...

I use this blog to share, mostly. Here's a neat article about the power of liberal arts in higher education.   https://gen.medium.com/my-semester-with-the-snowflakes-888285f0e662? I just taught a class to freshmen that was about the value of liberal arts. I'm sort of realizing that many of the other things that get taught in college are probably learnable on the job, whereas the liberal arts (arts and hard sciences) are not and require dedicated, focused time (assuming these subjects are taught correctly by people who know what they are doing). There are exceptions--some business courses--but we try to teach "people skills" in a vacuum. How does one teach business ethics without the liberal arts and history and other big subjects?

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref...

Maryanne Wolf: Reader Come Home - about how digital reading is changing our brains. I think this is extremely important in something I do, open educational resources, which are almost completely digital and which we are assuming are experienced by students just like traditional physical textbooks, only without the costs. They are not. I have a dog in this fight, having authored a successful OER ( http://www.exploringpublicspeaking.com ) Angela Duckworth: Grit  - about her extensive work on the "grit scale." I haven't quite figured out why this is so ground-breaking except that she has a lot of her primary research behind it. I was annoyed by her example of all these top-tier successful people. One can be successful without going to the Naval Academy, winning political races, or being awarded the Nobel Prize.  Ellen Langer: Mindfulness - not about meditation, but critical thinking and reflection. I liked it much better than I thought I was and need to revisit it. C...

What do we do about difficult students? More to the point, what is a difficult student? Is it one who comes to class but doesn't do their work yet expects special treatment? Is it one who likes to dominate in class discussions? Is it one who says inappropriate (and by that I mean sexist/ racist/etc.) types of things intentionally? Is it one with a learning disability that causes outbursts, interruptions, or lack of social control? Is it the sulker, the nonparticipant? Is the the one who wants to sit in your office and chat way past the time for office hours? Is it the one who emails about every point of the assignment? Is it the one who argues over grades, especially over "subjective" grades on writing or projects? Are there other types of difficult students? A few ideas: 1. rubrics. Best.Invention.Ever. They are time consuming to create and have to be revised, but they save a lot of time in grading. (Also Transparency in Learning, an interesting movement that I ...

Love this article Especially the quote by William James: I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time , will rend the hardest monuments of human pride .

Anyone else get that survey from Chronicle of Higher Ed about tenure of presidents? I took it, although I couldn't answer every question. While I have my suspicions, I did want to skew the data with feelings rather than thoughts (I make a big distinction between the two even though it appears others do not do so any longer.)

I am tenured so I can complain about it. The adage, "The reason the fights in academia are so bitter is because the stakes are so low" is one of my favorites. I have been embroiled in one that hinged on a few hundred dollars a year in pay. I would have gladly paid that to not have lost all this sleep. Tenure is a good thing--I'm not giving mine up--but it has unintended consequences. It means faculty are disincentivized. We know that a lot of faculty "rest" (euphemism) after getting it. We also know, but don't want to admit it, that tenure discourages faculty from looking elsewhere even when doing so would be a good thing, because they don't want to go through tenure again (it can be hellacious and risky). And because faculty are discouraged from leaving, they stay. They have institutional memory. A good thing, but also the grounds for long-standing grudges and bitterness over really small things to fester and become the reason for payback. I...

Fascinating article on Access college students. Some hidden assumptions here that access students are less than, and that access colleges don't provide access to elitist circle. Maybe some of us don't want to be in them.  https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/23/pew-study-finds-more-poor-students-attending-college?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=52d50b2bd6-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-52d50b2bd6-198482621&mc_cid=52d50b2bd6&mc_eid=ab27a3f05f

This is a fabulous essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (need to subscribe). As he says, the "undead texts" will be the ones remembered longest, even when in graduate school the professors try to destroy and deconstruct them. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Books-That-Wouldn-t-Die-/245879?key=yc0panBLrqCSy_jQRBofjCgEAHJ5yaQsqWLc_SlQbBRY3HYRT5ZklZvC2-IGcR6WYk5GT0VWR3djVk0tRmluUlA3VVBVajV0U2N2ejJOdmpIcnUwb2JlWmgwaw

There is so much to say about this I don't know where to start. My only regret here is that I don't have at hand the real statistics of access institutions in higher ed, but those are easily available from the National Center on Education Statistics if one wants them. The worst part for me personally is that what my colleagues and I do will be conflated with this crime. I work in an access college. We have no prestige like a Yale or Stanford or UCLA, despite doing great work. We take everybody and put them through the boot camp of higher education. A lot don't make it; access institutions have lower graduation rates. We cost less--less than 20% of these prestige places.  We don't have luxurious dorms. We don't have professors who appear on cable news shows and Good Morning America . We don't have Division I athletics teams and we don't have lazy rivers for students to float down when they should be studying.  We work hard. We actually teach....

Fascinating article: I don't agree with all of it, but it gives some food for thought and discussion. https://aeon.co/essays/schools-love-the-idea-of-a-growth-mindset-but-does-it-work

 I confess to not having blogged here for quite a while.  I will be in the future--I'm doing some relevant writing. My current research interest is gratitude, in general, in communication, in spiritual development, and in higher education. Although not quite linked to that, this article is thoughtful and reminds us of "the secret life of college students." https://diverseeducation.com/article/138698/?utm_campaign=DIV1902%20DAILY%20NEWSLETTER%20FEB15&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua