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Gary Brown

Why Liberal Arts Need Career Services - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...48973

careers

shared by Gary Brown on 04 Nov 09 - Cached
  • I have consulted with deans who say they really want to improve their career-services programs—but no, they can't offer career courses for credit, their professors aren't interested in supervising internships, and they must tread lightly around anything that might be seen by the faculty as encroaching vocationalism.
  • I've also heard from numerous professors, "Our good students go to graduate school. We don't need to focus on those who are looking for jobs."
  • I have also been told, "The professors are too busy teaching to worry about how the students will use their knowledge. It's not their job." And I've had more than one faculty member confess to me that they really aren't sure how what they teach applies in the nonacademic world.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • There's no way to predict which moments of a liberal-arts education will be directly relevant in the workplace, but it's imperative that students know such moments occur frequently, and that the skills and knowledge they're learning are far from obscure and irrelevant.
  • We use visual-thinking techniques to help students connect the dots between their academic experience and the workplace.
  • But the opportunity to teach a career course that directly draws from a liberal-arts curriculum is not offered at many institutions. Instead, if courses are offered at all, they typically focus on basic job-finding skills like résumé writing and networking, serving to reinforce professors' worst beliefs about career advising: that it distracts and detracts from the educational process.
  • Professors, academic deans, and career-center staff members must work together. Learn what is happening in each other's shops. And don't have just a superficial conversation about services—instead, engage in a conversation about what is truly distinct about the curriculum, what students are learning, and how to make employers care.
  • Career-center personnel should find out what employers are seeking and what they say about your students.
  • If more liberal-arts faculties and career experts get together, watch out—the results could be amazing.
  • Gary Brown on 04 Nov 09
     
    As we work with CLA, perhaps inviting Careers Services to join as independent reviewers will help the effort
  • Joshua Yeidel on 05 Nov 09
     
    What seems to be missing here is inclusion of employers directly into the learning community. If professors "aren't sure how what they teach applies in the nonacademic world", get somebody directly involved who is, as one voice in the conversation, anyway. Of course this will be challenging to the professoriate, but it could also be revitalizing.
Nils Peterson

Education Department Proposes To End Federal Funding To For-Profit Colleges Whose Stude... - 2 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...nding-jobs-loans_n_657821.html

assessment stakeholder financial aid higher_education accountability

shared by Nils Peterson on 24 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The Education Department proposed much-anticipated regulations Friday that would cut off federal aid to for-profit college programs if too many of their students default on loans or don't earn enough after graduation to repay them.
  • To qualify for federal student aid programs, career college programs must prepare students for "gainful employment."
  • But shares were mixed among companies such as ITT Educational Services Inc., Corinthian Colleges Inc., Education Management Corp. and Career Education Corp. Those companies operate career colleges focusing more on two-year programs or lower-income students and may need to make big changes
Gary Brown

How to Prepare Students for Careers - 0 views

www.convergemag.com/...pare-Students-for-Careers.html

careers

shared by Gary Brown on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Educators and industry partners can help students learn these skills through the following three practices:   1. Involve the community
  • Combine academic and technical knowledge That means educators must play on the same team.
  • . Make learning relevant Students need to see the tie between concepts they're learning and their application in life, said Allyson Knox, an academic program manager for Microsoft Corp.'s U.S. Partners in Learning program.
  • Gary Brown on 20 Apr 10
     
    walkiing the fine line
Gary Brown

The Rules of Faculty Club - Manage Your Career - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...49000

Graduate Student Prep

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Nov 09 - Cached
  • The third rule of Faculty Club: You must be a teacher to enter the club. Your adviser will not tell you that; your fellow graduate students won't understand that. So enjoy the research nirvana that is graduate school but know that you will be descending back into the cave if and when you are hired by a university. You may have difficulty accepting this rule. If you can't, stop reading this immediately and go back to work on your dissertation. Cease and desist. Only precede to Rule No. 4 once you have fully accepted and understood Rule No. 3. Once you do, then you must not expect to be given any actual guidance from your department on how to be a teacher. You will only be able to obtain those skills through your own efforts.
  • The fourth rule of Faculty Club: Your students will only know you as their teacher and do not care about your research unless you require them to know about your research. If you require them to know about your research, they will figure out your argument without understanding the complex road that you took to get there. That leads students to believe that the point of education is to tell a professor what he or she wants to hear rather than to think through the material for themselves.
  • You must be able to convey on a syllabus the course objective and the road map that you will be employing to get students there
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Nobody will ever tell you this, but your career will, in part, rest on having a well-thought-out philosophy of education
  • Teaching is a science. Be as methodical about developing teaching strategies and a teaching philosophy as you are in your research.
  • You must have enough teaching experience to handle Rules No. 5 and No. 6.
  • Stay focused on your research while being cognizant that you are preparing for a career as a teacher.
  • Gary Brown on 05 Nov 09
     
    another for those collecting the secret reality of teaching
Theron DesRosier

Obama proposes to raise academic standards by linking them to state benchmarks - washin... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010022202330.html

accreditation accountability standards

shared by Theron DesRosier on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 22 Feb 10
     
    "President Obama announced Monday he will seek to raise academic standards across the country by requiring states to certify that their benchmarks for reading and mathematics put students on track for college or a career. "
  • Theron DesRosier on 22 Feb 10
     
    NCLB Revives.
Theron DesRosier

Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto - 1 views

www.johntaylorgatto.com/...toc1.htm

History education

shared by Theron DesRosier on 15 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 15 Apr 10
     
    "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
Nils Peterson

Community as Curriculum - vol 2. The Guild/Distributed Continuum @ Dave's Educational Blog - 0 views

davecormier.com/...the-guild-distribute-continuum

shared by Nils Peterson on 22 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Community as curriculum is not meant as a simple alternative to the package version of learning. It is, rather, meant to point to the learning that takes place on top of that model and to point to the strategies for continuing learning throughout a career. There is a base amount of knowledge that is required to be able to enter a community, and there are methods for acquiring the specific kinds of literacy needed to learn within a specific community.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 22 Apr 10
       
      "[Rather it is] meant to point to the learning that takes place *on top of that model* and to point to the strategies for continuing learning throughout a career." Dave is stacking community learning as a layer OVER more traditional models, which I think is a different view than we articulated in our Spectrum
Kimberly Green

Would You Like Credit With That Internship? - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...65434

learning

shared by Kimberly Green on 10 May 10 - Cached
  • Kimberly Green on 10 May 10
     
    Students pay tuition to work for free ... unpaid internships are growing in this down economy, favoring the wealthy who can afford them. But internships are generally valuable for students, administrators say. The complementary courses involve journals, essays, oral presentations, or work portfolios. Independent studies lean toward academics. Companies often see academic credit as substitute compensation that qualifies interns as legally unpaid trainees and keeps them on their colleges' liability insurance. Advertisements specify: "Candidates must be able to receive academic credit." That makes some campus officials bristle. "What they're saying is holding the institution hostage," says Kathy L. Sims, director of career services at the University of California at Los Angeles. Employers don't know colleges' academic standards, she says. "It's really not their call whether their experience is creditworthy." Colleges have dealt with that quandary in various ways. Some, especially those with traditions of experiential learning, vet and monitor internships, enrolling students in courses designed to complement their real-world work. Others let professors sponsor independent studies based on internships. More and more have devised some form of noncredit recognition to try to satisfy employers without altering academic philosophies or making students pay tuition to work free. At Bates College, the game is up. "We're quite adamant about our refusal to play along," says James W. Hughes, a professor of economics. As chairman of the department eight years ago, he got dozens of calls from students, parents, and employers asking for credit for unpaid internships, mainly in the financial industry. "Why is it that we have to evaluate this experience," he says, "just so some multibillion-dollar bank can avoid paying $7.50 an hour?" But the law is vague, and arguably antiquated. In the for-profit sector, guidelines for legally unpaid internships come from a 1947 U
Sarah Usher

One Step Closer to My Dream - 3 views

My father was a police officer and he died protecting people and making this world a better place. All my life, I always wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and follow a path with police care...

police careers assessment education accountability higher_education

started by Sarah Usher on 01 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
Sarah Usher

One Step Closer to My Dream - 3 views

My father was a police officer and he died protecting people and making this world a better place. All my life, I always wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and follow a path with police care...

police careers assessment education accountability

started by Sarah Usher on 01 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
Sarah Usher

I Have Help and I Become a Police Officer - 1 views

I want to follow the footsteps of my father who was a decorated police officer. Not wanting to embarrass the reputation he has diligently planted in the police force, I decided to seek the help of ...

police careers

started by Sarah Usher on 17 Aug 11 no follow-up yet
Joshua Yeidel

New Web Site Compares Student Outcomes at Online Colleges - Technology - The Chronicle ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...47924

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 06 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 06 Aug 09
     
    "College Choices for Adults [website] provides adults with specific information about what students are supposed to learn in the colleges' mostly career-oriented programs and measurements of whether they did." That's the billing in the Chronicle, but when I wen to the site, I found mostly self-reports of engagement and satisfaction.
Nils Peterson

Open Access or Close It? Two Views | HASTAC - 2 views

www.hastac.org/...n-access-or-close-it-two-views

shared by Nils Peterson on 25 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Now here is the irony:   this morning, in the wake of the Publisher's Weekly article, I really wanted to be able to give all of my HASTAC readers a url so they could go right to my article.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 25 Jun 10
       
      so, her disciplinary and departmental affiliation rewards her for publishing in a closed community rather than for working in a world community and then when she wants to engage a world community she can't
  • My larger point?  We are in a confusing and damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't moment for publishing.  Scholarly publishing loses money.  Scholars who do not publish (at present) lose careers.  How do we balance these complex and intertwined issues in a sane way?  That is our question.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 25 Jun 10
       
      publishing reputation is a surrogate for reputation in community
Gary Brown

The Chimera of College Brands - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...65764

quality market accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 10 Jun 10 - Cached
  • What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands—that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards—is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions.
  • With a grant from the nonprofit Lumina Foundation for Education, physics and history professors from a range of Utah two- and four-year institutions are applying the "tuning" methods developed as part of the sweeping Bologna Process reforms in Europe.
  • The group also created "employability maps" by surveying employers of recent physics graduates—including General Electric, Simco Electronics, and the Air Force—to find out what knowledge and skills are needed for successful science careers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • If a student finishes and can't do what's advertised, they'll say, 'I've been shortchanged.'
  • Kathryn MacKay, an associate professor of history at Weber State University, drew on recent work from the American Historical Association to define learning goals in historical knowledge, thinking, and skills.
  • In the immediate future, as the higher-education market continues to globalize and the allure of prestige continues to grow, the value of university brands is likely to rise. But at some point, the countervailing forces of empiricism will begin to take hold. The openness inherent to tuning and other, similar processes will make plain that college courses do not vary in quality in anything like the way that archaic, prestige- and money-driven brands imply. Once you've defined the goals, you can prove what everyone knows but few want to admit: From an educational standpoint, institutional brands are largely an illusion for which students routinely overpay.
  • Gary Brown on 10 Jun 10
     
    The argumet for external stakeholders is underscored, among other implications.
Kimberly Green

Career Coach: The psychology of building a work team - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010072304294.html

change management relationship

shared by Kimberly Green on 13 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Kimberly Green on 13 Aug 10
     
    this article has suggestions for protocols to address typical team dysfunctions. Might be useful to suggest to depts as part of strategies for successful assessment work.
Gary Brown

Learning Assessments: Let the Faculty Lead the Way - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...26779

assessment

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The barriers to faculty involvement in assessment have been extensively catalogued over the years. Promotion and tenure systems do not reward such work. Time is short and other agendas loom larger. Most faculty members have no formal training in assessment—or, for that matter, in teaching and course design. Given developments in K-12, there are concerns, too, about the misuse of data, and skepticism about whether assessment brings real benefits to learners.
  • Moreover, as Robin Wilson points out, some campuses have found ways to open up the assessment conversation, shifting the focus away from external reporting, and inviting faculty members to examine their own students’ learning in ways that lead to improvement.
  • Does engagement with assessment’s questions change the way a faculty member thinks about her students and their learning? How and under what conditions does it change what he does in his classroom—and are those changes improvements for learners? How does evidence—which can be messy, ambiguous, discouraging, or just plain wrong—actually get translated into pedagogical action? What effects—good, bad, or uncertain—might engagement in assessment have on a faculty member’s scholarship, career trajectory, or sense of professional identity?
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Hutchings is a critical leader in our work--good links to have available, too.
Gary Brown

Texas A&M's Faculty Ratings: Right and Wrong - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Edu... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...124330

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • "Academia is highly specialized. We don't mean to be exclusive. We are a public-serving group of people. But at the same time, that public isn't well-enough aware of what we do and who we are to evaluate us."
  • But the think tank is correct that taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Public-university operating costs in Texas have gone up more than 60 percent in the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation, and professors are among the state's highest-paid public employees. The state needs accountability measures, and they must be enforced by a party other than the faculty, who, it could easily be charged, have a conflict of interest. That's what Texas A&M got right.
  • Moosally is right about one thing: The public isn't well aware of what she and many of her colleagues do. But they should be. That is not to say that the public will be able to understand what goes on in all of the chemistry laboratories in Texas. But Moosally teaches English at a college that is not exactly tasked with performing cutting-edge research. Houston-Downtown's mission is to provide "educational opportunities and access to students from a variety of backgrounds including many first-generation college students."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • No doubt there is useful research coming out of the university system. But plenty could be omitted without a great deal of detriment to students' education. For instance, Hugill's most recent contributions have included a chapter on "Transitions in Hegemony: A Theory Based on State Type and Technology" and the article "German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914." Moosally's master's thesis was titled "Resumptive Pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic: A Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Account," and her current research interests include "interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest [and] cross-linguistic patterns of agreement."
  • Only 35 percent of respondents felt it was very important for colleges to "provide useful information to the public on issues affecting their daily lives."
  • According to a 2004 survey by The Chronicle, 71 percent of Americans thought it was very important for colleges to prepare undergraduates for careers, while only 56 percent thought it was very important for colleges to "discover more about the world through research."
  • What Texas A&M officials have also missed is that faculty members must be held accountable for what they teach.
  • Professors receive more credit for teaching higher-level students. But again, that is backward. The idea should be to give senior faculty members more credit for teaching introductory classes.
  • Moreover, the metric entirely ignores teaching quality. Who cares how many "student hours" professors put in if they are not particularly good teachers anyway?
  • Ultimately there needs to be a systemic solution to the problem of teacher quality. Someone—a grown-up, preferably—needs to get into the classroom and watch what is being done there.
  • Gary Brown on 08 Sep 10
     
    Another one in which the comments say more than I might--but the range of these accountability pieces underscore the work to do....
Gary Brown

Making College Degrees Easier to Interpret - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...27045

employers

shared by Gary Brown on 21 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Over the past few decades, the central purpose of undergraduate education in the United States has steadily evolved away from elite studies in the liberal arts and toward course work that prepares students for successful careers in their chosen fields. 
  • how do employers determine the values of the college degrees held by young job applicants? 
  • There is essentially no method to determine which of the three graduates have the knowledge and skills that match the advertised position. Grades and academic standards often vary so much by institution, department, and instructor that transcripts are written off as arbitrary and meaningless by those making hiring decisions. Outside fields with licensure exams like accounting and nursing, employers often hire workers based on connections, intuition, and the sometimes-misleading reputations of applicants’ alma maters. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This system doesn’t allow labor markets to function efficiently.
  • To rectify this broken hiring system, academia and industry should form stronger partnerships to better determine which skills and knowledge students in various fields need to master
  • The traditional college transcript is simply too impenetrable for anyone outside—or inside—academia to comprehend.
  • Gary Brown on 21 Sep 10
     
    The purposes are problematic, but the solution points to one of our approaches.  Where is John Dewey when we need him?
Gary Brown

Disciplines Follow Their Own Paths to Quality - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...125055

assessment accreditation critical thinking

shared by Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • But when it comes to the fundamentals of measuring and improving student learning, engineering professors naturally have more to talk about with their counterparts at, say, Georgia Tech than with the humanities professors at Villanova
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Perhaps this is too bad....
  • But there is no nationally normed way to measure the particular kind of critical thinking that students of classics acquire
  • er colleagues have created discipline-specific critical-reasoning tests for classics and political science
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Political science cultivates skills that are substantially different from those in classics, and in each case those skills can't be measured with a general-education test.
  • he wants to use tests of reasoning that are appropriate for each discipline
  • I believe Richard Paul has spent a lifetime articulating the characteristics of discipline based critical thinking. But anyway, I think it is interesting that an attempt is being made to develop (perhaps) a "national standard" for critical thinking in classics. In order to assess anything effectively we need a standard. Without a standard there are no criteria and therefore no basis from which to assess. But standards do not necessarily have to be established at the national level. This raises the issue of scale. What is the appropriate scale from which to measure the quality and effectiveness of an educational experience? Any valid approach to quality assurance has to be multi-scaled and requires multiple measures over time. But to be honest the issues of standards and scale are really just the tip of the outcomes iceberg.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 29 Oct 10
       
      Missing the notion that the variance is in the activity more than the criteria.  We hear little of embedding nationally normed and weighted assignments and then assessing the implementation and facilitation variables.... mirror, not lens.
  • the UW Study of Undergraduate Learning (UW SOUL). Results from the UW SOUL show that learning in college is disciplinary; therefore, real assessment of learning must occur (with central support and resources)in the academic departments. Generic approaches to assessing thinking, writing, research, quantitative reasoning, and other areas of learning may be measuring something, but they cannot measure learning in college.
  • It turns out there is a six week, or 210+ hour serious reading exposure to two or more domains outside ones own, that "turns on" cross domain mapping as a robust capability. Some people just happen to have accumulated, usually by unseen and unsensed happenstance involvements (rooming with an engineer, son of a dad changing domains/careers, etc.) this minimum level of basics that allows robust metaphor based mapping.
Gary Brown

Struggling Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves, Research Shows - Teaching - The... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...64004

feedback peer review

shared by Gary Brown on 13 Feb 10 - Cached
  • "We're trying to document the role of processes that are different from standard student-outcome measures and standard ability measures,
  • We're interested in various types of studying, setting goals for oneself, monitoring one's progress as one goes through learning a particular topic."
  • Mr. Zimmerman has spent most of his career examining what can go wrong when people try to learn new facts and skills. His work centers on two common follies: First, students are often overconfident about their knowledge, assuming that they understand material just because they sat through a few lectures or read a few chapters. Second, students tend to attribute their failures to outside forces ("the teacher didn't like me," "the textbook wasn't clear enough") rather than taking a hard look at their own study habits.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • That might sound like a recipe for banal lectures about study skills. But training students to monitor their learning involves much more than simple nagging, Mr. Zimmerman says. For one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • or one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • "The first one is, Give students fast, accurate feedback about how they're doing. And the second rule, which is less familiar to most people, is, Now make them demonstrate that they actually understand the feedback that has been given."
  • "I did a survey in December," he says. "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • And over time, we've realized that these methods have a much greater effect if they're embedded within the course content.
  • "Once we focus on noticing and correcting errors in whatever writing strategy we're working on, the students just become junkies for feedback,"
  • "Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection," Mr. Zimmerman says. "We're trying to help instructors and students see errors not as an endpoint, but as a beginning point for understanding what they know and what they don't know, and how they can approach problems in a more effective way."
  • Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection,"
  • Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's
  • "Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's,
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • What I am particularly amazed by is that the idea of feedback, reflection and explicitly demonstrated understanding (essentially a Socratic approach of teaching), is considered an innovation.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Feb 10
     
    selected for the focus on feedback. The adoption by half or fewer, depending, is also interesting as the research is of the type we would presume to be compelling.
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