Nine Guiding Principles For Women In Higher Education

Highlighting the nine guiding principles to help women succeed in their academic careers. Although there are more women in higher education than ever before—and increasingly in leadership positions—their paths to success are more difficult than those paved for men. Nine Guiding Principles for Women in Higher Education is a concise and accessible resource aimed at helping women faculty succeed in their academic careers. Karyn Z. Sproles offers guidance, humor, and courage to women in higher education, paying particular attention to those with children and women of color. Based on a wide range of scholarship, stories from dozens of women, and Sproles's personal experience from 34 years as a professor, department chair, and dean, Nine Principles offers advice on • facing down impostor syndrome, • avoiding social isolation, • building networks of mentors, • preparing for tenure, • balancing teaching, scholarship, and home life, and more. Practical and visionary, the nine principles guide readers from the beginning of their careers through to leadership roles. Women in academia—including adjuncts, graduate students, and tenure-track professors—will find the tools they need to balance success with the rest of life's demands. Each chapter ends with a quick list of advice for easy reference and suggested reading to explore more on the chapter's topic. Rounding out the book is a workshop section that can be used by individual readers or as a guide for conducting workshops and faculty development programs.

"This book is an accessible and readable resource for women who are navigating obstacles in their career in higher education. The book draws on secondary sources, anecdotes, and the author's own experiences to suggest ways that women-mostly faculty and administrators-can thrive at their institution"--

The Development of Personal Learning Environments in Higher Education explores how today’s knowledge-based, learner-centered virtual platforms, which often limit teaching to a complimentary facilitation role, can compromise with the requirements and regulations of colleges and universities. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) driven by culturally responsive teaching and learner autonomy represent a shift in the higher education paradigm, but how can scholars, designers, administrators, and faculty ensure effective, institutionally compatible construction and management of these systems? This book offers forward-thinking insights into the variety of student-centered learning interactions, particularly culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogies, that can be integrated into PLEs. Attending to quality assessment rubrics, the nuances of stakeholders’ needs, and theoretically sound frameworks, these cross-cultural, interdisciplinary chapters explore how leaders, instructors, technologists, and learners can form a precise yet flexible ecosystem to fully realize PLEs in which co-created, intercultural narratives yield rich, relevant digital learning experiences.

Creating a Place for Adult Learners in Higher Education offers deep insights into how to attract, teach, support, and retain students over the age of 25 – an important yet often overlooked student group. Comprehensive in scope, this book covers all the main aspects of adult students’ relationships with higher education institutions: recruitment, admissions, and financing; course and program provision and teaching approaches; and student support, retention, and completion. The discussion is bolstered by chapters of analysis on adult student demographics (including both diversities and commonalities), exploration of leadership challenges, and discussion of measurements of success. Drawing from the most up-to-date research as well as practical experience and descriptions of best practices by programs historically serving adults, the authors provide a broad set of strategies and recommendations to place adult students at the center of the educational process. Higher education leaders, practitioners, and administrators will find this book an invaluable resource as they seek to better account for and support this key student group, which now comprises approximately 30% of the US undergraduate population.

By providing practical advice on how to inform and lead a successful assessment program in student affairs, Coordinating Divisional and Departmental Student Affairs Assessment, 2nd Edition helps student affairs professionals understand the impact of their initiatives, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance student learning, development, and engagement. Student affairs assessment plays a significant role in shaping the overall college experience. As higher education transforms, there is an even greater demand for student affairs assessment that informs practice, illuminates equity gaps, and improves student learning. This second edition builds upon the concepts of the first edition while adding essential topics that address the changing dynamics of leading assessment in a department or division in student affairs such as how to use and select assessment technology, meaningful ways to collaborate with institutional research, as well as creating equity-centered assessment practices. By utilizing the strategies in this book, student affairs divisions can create evidence-based practices that contribute to a more inclusive and supportive campus environment, foster student engagement, and ultimately enhance the educational journey for students. This updated and revised edition has been written with new and seasoned assessment practitioners in mind. It’s an ideal resource for graduate students and other student affairs practitioners who seek to find practical information to guide their own assessment practice.

In a contemporary media-rich society, distance education is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from mainstream traditional methods. Contemporary students, too, have greater need than ever before for education that caters to their specific needs and hectic schedules. Outlooks and Opportunities in Blended and Distance Learning investigates the impact of the digital age on various methods of distance education, such as e-learning, virtual learning, online learning, and m-learning. Researchers, educators, and students currently engaged in or looking to implement distance education principles in their own practices will find a seminal reference collection exploring new methods of offering flexibility, accessibility, and freedom to students with a variety of educational backgrounds, situations, and needs.

With the rising occurrence of human caused, natural, and technological crises, Investigating the Design and Implementation of Operational Safety Plans for Crisis at Higher Education Institutions offers guiding principles, implementation factors, and best practices for creating more effective operational safety plans at higher education institutions. In many cases, limited resources prior to a crisis may lead to inadequate planning that hampers implementation. Additionally, operational safety plans typically are created or revised in a reactive manner after the fact. As the result of an exhaustive literature review, the author determined that, unlike other fields, effective best practices for operational safety planning are either unknown to the institutions that need them most or institutional factors and financial constraints prevent them from implementing them in full.

Over the past 30 years our public school system has received an unprecedented amount of attention as this concerns methods of school reform and policy strategies for bringing about this reform. During the 1980s the emphasis of school reform was on transparency through school-community partnerships. Business and philanthropy, for example, became involved with issues of schooling that was unheard of prior to this period. The 1980s also gave rise to issues of school finance and student performance that went beyond traditional views that tended to focus on finance “adequacy” to views that focused more on school finance arrangements that would lead to actual “equitable outcomes” in student performance. The 1990s witnessed the emergence of the comprehensive school reform movement whereby curriculum outsourcing occurred at rates that had never occurred before. With this movement, the role of teachers and school leaders in the creation of school curriculum diminished as school districts increasingly purchased vendor-related curriculum packages, which included teacher and leader training modules and methods of curriculum assessment. On the heels of the increasing tendency of school districts to outsource school curriculum to curriculum-vendors came a rise in demands for school accountability and school outcomes. This was particularly evident with the passage of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2001). NCLB was also developed within a political context that called for demands in the academic improvement of schools and school districts that housed historically disenfranchised students. These demands were particularly important as the nation experienced and continues to experience dramatic increases in student racial and ethnic diversity. This volume, entitled, Leading Schools in Challenging Times: Eye to the Future, discusses varying types of school leadership in the context of key topics that have been at the center of on-going school reform in the United States. These topics include challenges, opportunities and issues associated with our administrator and teacher leadership pipeline, preparation and development; leadership and school finance reform, leadership and changing student and population demographics; leadership and the role of community; issues of leadership, policy, public accountability and school performance outcomes. The authors also explicate these issues with a view to the future and the status of leadership in our public school system.