Positive emotions: passionate scholarship and student transformation

This paper challenges the practical and conceptual understanding of the role of emotions in higher education from the twin perspectives of transition and transformation. Focusing on the neglected area of positive emotions, exploratory data reveal a rich, low-level milieu of undergraduate emotional awareness in students chiefly attributed to pedagogic actions, primarily extrinsically orientated, and pervasive throughout the learning experience. The data conceive positive affect as oppositional, principally ephemeral and linked to performative pedagogic endeavours of getting, knowing and doing. A cyclical social dynamic of reciprocity, generating positive feedback loops, is highlighted. Finally we inductively construct a tentative ‘emotion-transition framework’ to assist our understanding of positive emotion as a force for transformational change; our contention is that higher education might proactively craft pedagogic spaces so as to unite the feeling discourse, the thinking discourse (epistemological self) and the wider life-self (ontological) discourse.     

Content and Context of the Administrative Internship: How Mentoring and Sustained Activities Impact Preparation

As universities prepare educational leaders for twenty-first century schools, the quality and authenticity of the internship experience require both the strengths of university faculty and the expertise of practitioners to create authentic experiences that seek to bridge the theory-to-practice divide. One mechanism to achieve this is through quality mentorship by school- and central-office-based personnel during the internship experience. A central aspect of this professional relationship is the ability for the mentor to provide access to quality activities that will prepare the aspiring leader for his/her first administrative position. This exploratory study examined language utilized by interns in their time logs as well as information gleaned from preliminary surveys of both interns and mentors upon completion of their experience. Findings revealed the complexity of language analysis and revealed a need for understanding activities of interns and interactions with mentors in a contextual fashion.     

Getting emotional: a critical evaluation of recent trends in the development of school leaders

Emotion is a growing focus for contemporary thinking about leadership in public policy and corporate arenas. In British education systems, three imperatives are evident: the idea that transformation is essential; leadership succession in crisis; and, more recently, that leaders must be able to run organisations that address the emotional well-being of staff and students. Viewed as a key outcome of schooling, its importance is mirrored in school leadership, especially professional development. This article considers whether this represents a step-change in leadership development praxis or is, instead, an invasive form of emotional engineering redolent of long-established orthodoxies of control and domination. If so, it is argued, leadership development as the advocacy of emotional acumen presents moral technology as a new form for intervening in leaders' emotional selves, thereby distracting them from addressing fundamental aspects of education for which they are primarily responsible.     

Contraction: implications for school leaders

Ackoff's circular structure has been successfully utilised to combine hierarchy and democracy in various industries. This paper argues that this structure is the most appropriate democratic structure for the internal governance of public schools. It concludes that a circularity of power relations between administrators and teachers would create genuinely empowering teacher participation, improve co‐ordination, foster teacher self‐actualisation and expressiveness, alleviate teacher shortages, help attract high quality persons to teaching careers, ensure appropriate (service oriented) teacher supervision, and increase the number of successful school improvement projects.     

Transfer Student Success: Exploring Community College,University, and Individual Predictors

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates community college transfer success by exploring the relationship between individual and institutional-level characteristics at students’ two- and four-year institutions. Using statewide administrative data from North Carolina, this study employs a cross-classified multilevel model to investigate the impact that a student’s community college and four-year transfer institution have on post-transfer success. Our findings offer important and compelling insights into the relationship between transfer students, the community college they attended, the four-year transfer institution, and educational outcomes. While individual effects were small, we find several institutional factors associated with student success. Attendance at a large community college or having a public university in the same county as their community college is positively associated with student success, whereas size of the university is negatively related to grades during the first year and persistence to the second year. While the four-year institution’s selectivity is negatively related to many of our outcomes, transferring to a Historically Black College or University is positively associated with GPA, college persistence, and degree completion.     

Promoting Evidence-based Education Practice and Better Student Outcomes through Improved Consumer Reporting

The past two decades have seen an increased need for better consumer reporting in education. This has resulted in part from a variety of education initiatives sponsored by the US Department of Education (ED) and others. The initiatives have increased the number of school improvement options available to educators and encouraged—or sometimes required—that choices be guided by “scientifically-based research.”     

The Canadian Linked Data Initiative: Charting a Path to a Linked Data Future

ABSTRACT

This article is a preliminary report on the work of the Canadian Linked Data Initiative (CLDI), a collaboration between five of Canada’s largest research libraries, Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and Canadiana.org. Although still in its nascent stage, participating institutions are working together to advance the technical services divisions of our libraries in the area of linked data. Project working groups are making progress in five main areas: grant funding, digital collections, education and training, legacy metadata enhancement, and in the evaluation and adaptation of Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative tools. By working across geographic and institutional boundaries, the CLDI aims to chart a path to a new age of technical services, one based on the foundation of Linked Open Data.     

Deep Dive into KBART

ABSTRACT

The Deep Dive into KBART preconference workshop provided a comprehensive overview of the National Information Standards Organization Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) Phase II Recommended Practice (http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/rp-9–2014/). The workshop was divided into four sections. The first provided an overview of the background, purpose, and value of KBART to all members of the information supply chain. The next section focused on the basic guidelines for effective exchange of metadata with knowledgebases, including method of exchange, data format, file naming conventions, and frequency of exchange. The remaining two sections of the workshop addressed the correct use of KBART data fields, first in relation to serials and then to monographs. Through classroom instruction, interactive quizzes, and hands-on exercises, the workshop provided in-depth coverage of all KBART data elements, with special focus on many of the most frequently asked questions about the recommended practice.     

The interaction of student and program variables for the purpose of developing a model for predicting graduation from graduate programs over a 10-year period

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there is some factor or set of factors which will predict the probability of graduation from doctoral programs. This study concentrated on two areas: (a) the factors available to the selection committee when the students apply for admission into graduate programs, and (b) those factors emerging after admission, resulting from the students' meeting program-imposed requirements for graduation. Data were collected from the file of each student admitted to the doctoral program in Educational Administration. The results of the study indicated that program variables are more important than admission variables in predicting graduation. and the technique of Path Analysis is highly recommended to study the problem of student progression through graduate departments.     

A Technical/Strategic Paradigm for Online Executive Education

This article discusses the development and delivery of online courses for the executive education audience. The goal is to introduce a new framework, the technical/strategic paradigm, that will help educators to identify the pedagogical needs of disparate executive groups and adjust their online course development plans accordingly. We describe how four key elements of online courses (course structure, content‐based learning materials, assignments, and learning assessment) should be fashioned in a way that honors the technical or strategic focus of the learning environment. How the technical/strategic paradigm molds well with many different types of executive educational audiences and settings is illustrated. Course developers seeking advice on how to put these ideas into practice will find lists of resources and implementable recommendations. Ultimately, we argue that some of the pitfalls that faculty experience when transitioning from a traditional business school environment to an online executive education environment can be attributed to a misunderstanding of the degree to which students expect technical versus strategic content.