Teachers

I was on a search committee in my department this past fall. I am happy to say that we hired a wonderful candidate who had impressed everyone during the visit. There were several levels of decision before we narrowed the list down to three to interview; many people offered their opinion on everything from the fundability of research projects to pedigree, publication count, etc. After all was said and done, it turns out that nearly all the people who made the first cut (i.e. top 20 or so) had received their PhDs in either 2009 or 2010. The same holds for 100% of the finalists.Which brings me to the topic of today's post. I was recently asked to provide external evaluation of several applicants for an entry level faculty position at another institution. I was provided with information on a small set of finalists, among whom all but one had received a PhD in the past five years. (In my field, a postoc appointment is commonly 2-3 years). The one candidate was the exception had received a PhD over a decade ago, in fact the same year when I started my PhD. Again, this is an entry-level faculty position.This is a question to which I really don't know the answer: how do you compare the records of people who are very far apart in career stage but are applying for the same type of (entry-level) position? Especially if the more senior candidate has been doing science all along, so they have a considerably longer publication list? For instance, what if that candidate has the publication record comparable to an associate or full professor, but you cannot hire them at that level and the candidate is willing to start at the entry level?Let's face it: people unconsciously discriminate based on all sorts or criteria, including age. Being aware of bias, we can try really hard to correct for it. Let us assume we want to give a really objective evaluation of a set of candidates with quite a spread in terms of experience, and we really don't want the judgement to be clouded by potential bias over the candidates' age, or any other bias that could be lurking under the guise of age. So what's the best way to do it?1) If we look at the paper count, the more senior candidate willing to take an entry position would win. But this could potentially hold even for mediocre senior candidates versus excellent junior candidates. A direct comparison of the number of publications in a no-go, just as it is would be for most (successful) assistant professors versus (successful) full professors. The same holds for all cumulative metrics, like the h-index. People who have been in science longer have higher citation indices.2) Do you instead compare average output per unit time? The senior candidate may be at a disadvantage here, especially if it is a woman, who has perhaps had some downtime on account of family. We need to be aware that a year or two of lower productivity does not mean anything in the grand scheme of one's career, and that a junior candidate may have similar dips in productivity down the line anyway, when life catches up with them.3) Do you instead compare output per unit time at a given number of years post PhD? For instance, compare them at 2 years or 5 years post PhD? Even this is not perfect, as I can say we nearly interviewed a candidate who was just getting ready to graduate because his PhD record was absolutely unbelievable (we ended up not interviewing because we realized we simply lacked too many facilities that he would need to be successful). Also, people work on different types of projects, some are shorter-, some longer-term.4) There are letters of recommendation, which you may or may not have when you are making a given evaluation. There are research and teaching statements, which carry a lot of weight. How exciting and potentially transformative someone's future vision is, as communicated through the research statement, is very, very important. Even so, a candidate with more experience is likely (hopefully?) better at communicating

Today began with another wonderfully named pak-fap - the acronym creator is either never on the internet or has a very VERY clean mind - at which there was a lot of belligerence and aggression, though I was a Good Junior Member and sat quietly in my corner trying to look like I totally agreed with the person who was mostly the target of the aggression. Then the academic women in the department (post-docs, teaching fellows, TT-types) went out for lunch, which was fun (and included an official Griping Session) and tasty, but also a lot of people.Although it was good to talk about the panel with Senior Woman (the most senior female person at the moment, who isn't actually a prof or doing an admin-job-with-status, which says something about the gender-state of our department. Especially when I'm the next-most senior! scary!) who has done a lot of these. She was able to top some of my 'aargh' moments from this morning - the panel she sat on to help approve a new degree programme, which requires detailed supporting letters from independent experienced academics, where there was ONE supporting letter from a person who WAS TOO an academic, according to the proposers, but who was still working on their PhD and worked for an entirely non-academic organisation (and no, this was not in a field where it's normal for faculty members to have other terminal degrees...). I mean, typos I understand, confusion about regulations I relate to, but proposing a degree programme without understanding what the approvals process means by 'an experienced academic'??So then instead of going back to the office I came home, ostensibly to work, but actually I napped. Again. oops!

Literacy is a gateway skill for the American dream, says Dr. Robert Cooter, dean of Bellarmine's School of Education. Illiteracy impacts the economy. Children who can't read are less likely to go to college. It can effect their lifespan and it correlates with the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

Early childhood advocates received some big shots of energy last week. First, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared her dedication to early childhood, including her participation in a national initiative cleverly titled "Too Small to Fail." Second, the J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation, announced social impact bonds and $20 million in investments in the first phase of its public-private partnerships projects known as the "Early Childhood Innovation Accelerator" project.

This summer, children under the age of five will be able to enjoy the delight of a good beach read with the introduction of a summer reading list customized just for them. Put together by the Association for Library Service to Children and LEGO DUPLO, this is the first summer reading list to bring together two things young children love most -- playing and reading -- to encourage early literacy skills.

The doctors told Brockman that her sons need to be in small classes with research-based reading instruction and intensive math and language remediation. As the law requires, administrators at Potomac Landing Elementary School set up an individualized education program (IEP) team, which meets with Brockman. As sometimes happens, these meetings have not gone well, Brockman said. Learning disability issues appear to be one of the greatest sources of friction between parents and schools. Brockman's account reveals how clumsy educators can be in communicating to parents what they are doing with their children, and why.

It seems everyday you read another story about how much college costs, how much debt college graduates are burdened with, and how little a college degree helps when it comes to finding a job....Read Full Post

When C-SPAN hit the cable airwaves -- “cable airwaves” is an oxymoron, but you know what I mean -- it was greeted as a breakthrough for democracy. Finally, the public would be able to watch its elected representatives unfiltered, in their natural habitat! Surely such unfettered access would lead to a better informed public, a more vigilant eye on the government, and a golden age of the common weal.Well, no. As it turned out, the government was far more interested in watching us than we were in watching it. Who knew?The flaw in the theory that C-SPAN would save us all was that it assumed that public indifference to politics was a sort of sour grapes born of lack of access. If only we could expand access, the theory went, interest would follow. Stream it and they will view. But they don’t, mostly. As it happened, indifference was the independent variable. I’m increasingly convinced that the same idea applies to workshops.I’m referring here to on-campus workshops that are designed to engage faculty and staff. Typically, someone who wants to encourage adoption of some new technology or practice -- whether it be Respondus or outcomes assessment -- hosts a series of workshops open to all, ideally hitting different class periods to minimize schedule conflicts. One or two people show up, the presenter gets frustrated, and the cycle repeats in a few weeks.Asking about workshop non-attendance is sort of like asking about non-voting. The excuses are thin, ritualistic, and post-hoc. (I don’t think it’s a matter of conscious lying, exactly; it’s closer to rationalizing.) Rebutting the rationalizations doesn’t really help, either; people who want to skip -- which is to say, most people -- will skip. Shaming certainly doesn’t work, and bribery raises issues of its own.Instead, I’m thinking that we should drop the “cable tv” model and move to the internet model. Instead of a single channel or meeting hoping to attract as many people as possible to a relatively passive experience, the way to go is to engage some early adopters, and then encourage viral transmission. Dave sees what the program can do, and he tells Steve and Jen. Steve and Jen get on board, and each tell a few friends of their own. In other words, the key is to define indifference, rather than non-attendance, as the problem. Attack the indifference -- preferably by having trusted colleagues show or discuss the cool new thing they’ve found -- and the non-attendance will take care of itself.That’s not because the content or delivery of workshops is poor. As with anything, they range from outstanding to awful. The problem is that workshops tend to presume a context of awareness in which the usefulness of what’s being offered is already clear. And most of the time, it isn’t.The occasional raging success -- okay, I should say workshops usually don’t work, but that’s a boring headline -- suggests that interest is the key. We recently had a well-attended and very well received workshop on Open Educational Resources. Part of what made that as successful as it was, I think, was that people understood the appeal. OER could reduce textbook costs for students, which isn’t just an economic issue. In a community college context, many students don’t buy books in order to keep costs down; over time, they struggle to keep up academically. If students had access to free OER, we could take costs out of the picture, and give the student of limited means a fighting chance. That message resonated with a gratifyingly large group, and I suspect there are more to come.In that case, the cause was appealing enough that the workshop format wasn’t a deal-breaker. But in the absence of something as obvious as OER, the viral model strikes me as far more promising. As long as the early adopters are supported and feel valued rather than used, it seems likelier to work and far less likely to result in mostly-empty rooms. Watching the occasional Representative orate to an empty Hou

Tom McNeal’s just out Far Far Away is getting some well-deserved buzz so I figured I would post my brief goodreads comments, written after reading it (and liking it quite a lot) a few months back. A very unique read, sort of spooky, definitely creepy as it goes on. With one notable exception, the characters are-not-quite Grimm characters, but nearly. The book is filled with Grimm tropes and you think the author is going to take you in somewhat predictable fairy-tale directions and he doesn’t. McNeal really knows how to make food sound really scrumptious and also various characters twinkly and fun until…they are not. It probably would have given me nightmares as a kid. That is, I was the sort of kid who always freaked out around clowns and there is a character in this book that reinforces just why they freaked me out. Can’t say more without spoilage.

Remember when summer was a delicious three-month break from reading, writing and math? Now it's more likely seen as that period between school years in which too many kids forget too much of what they just spent months learning. There's even a name for it -- "summer learning loss" -- but it doesn't affect all students in the same way, even if this phenomenon has been made out to be broadly based. Middle-class students actually see learning gains over the summer, according to Johns Hopkins researchers, while students from low-income families see a significant slide, concentrating the problem on poor children.