Building the Intentional University

Building the Intentional University
Author: Stephen M. Kosslyn
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2018-08-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262536196

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How to rebuild higher education from the ground up for the twenty-first century. Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.

Building an Intentional School Culture

Building an Intentional School Culture
Author: Charles F. Elbot
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2007-10-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1452294348

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"Charles Elbot and David Fulton get it! They get how dominant a force a school′s culture is in assisting—or thwarting—the development of learning and character and how extraordinarily difficult it is to make changes. Unlike most of us, they also get how possible it is to build a desirable school culture. This tidy little volume is the authors′ first step in sharing their inventive ′lesson plans′ from their successful work as school culture builders. When we take these lessons learned to heart, we too will get it!" —Roland Barth, Professor Emeritus, Graduate School of Education Harvard University Transform your school by shaping a culture based on shared values, beliefs, and behaviors. Based on lessons learned from the authors′ work in improving school culture for more than sixty schools across the country, this inspiring guide for school leaders helps create an "intentional school culture" that fosters excellence, builds character, and improves student achievement. The book provides tools, case studies, strategies, and implementation plans for building a strong school culture and offers guidelines for teacher trainings, principal workshops, staff meetings, and district-level use. The authors demonstrate how to: Support students′ independent and interdependent thinking and behavior Foster ethical decision making Collaborate with students, parents, and teachers Evaluate and monitor a plan to enhance the existing school culture The authors illustrate how deliberately shaping a school culture cultivates faculty trust, sets the groundwork for raising test scores, and is a critical ingredient in building a successful school.

Knowledge for Sale

Knowledge for Sale
Author: Lawrence Busch
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Education
ISBN: 026203607X

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How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants. Students, administrators, and scholars have begun to think of themselves as economic actors rather than seekers of knowledge. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Busch urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies—market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty—break down. In this future, universities value learning and not training, scholarship grapples with society's most pressing problems rather than quick fixes for corporate interests, and democracy is enriched by its educated and engaged citizens.

The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs

The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs
Author: Richard A. Detweiler
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2021-11-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262543109

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Empirical evidence for the value of a liberal arts education: how and why it has a lasting impact on success, leadership, altruism, learning, and fulfillment. In ongoing debates over the value of a college education, the role of the liberal arts in higher education has been blamed by some for making college expensive, impractical, and even worthless. Defenders argue that liberal arts education makes society innovative, creative, and civic-minded. But these qualities are hard to quantify, and many critics of higher education call for courses of study to be strictly job-specific. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Detweiler, drawing on interviews with more than 1,000 college graduates aged 25 to 65, offers empirical evidence for the value of a liberal arts education. Detweiler finds that a liberal arts education has a lasting impact on success, leadership, altruism, learning, and fulfillment over a lifetime. Unlike other defenders of a liberal arts education, Detweiler doesn’t rely on philosophical arguments or anecdotes but on data. He developed a series of interview questions related to the content attributes of liberal arts (for example, course assignments and majors), the context attributes (out-of-class interaction with faculty and students, teaching methods, campus life), and the purpose attributes (adult life outcomes). Interview responses show that although both the content of study and the educational context are associated with significant life outcomes, the content of study has less relationship to positive adult life outcomes than the educational context. The implications of this research, Detweiler points out, range from the advantages of broadening areas of study to factors that could influence students’ decisions to attend certain colleges.

Forming Intentional Disciples

Forming Intentional Disciples
Author: Sherry A. Weddell
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2015-11-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1612789439

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How can we transmit a living, personal Catholic faith to future generations? By coming to know Jesus Christ, and following him as his disciples. These are times of immense challenge and immense opportunity for the Catholic Church. Consider these statistics for the United States. Only 30 percent of Americans who were raised Catholic are still practicing. Fully 10 percent of all adults in America are ex-Catholics. The number of marriages celebrated in the Church decreased dramatically, by nearly 60 percent, between 1972 and 2010. Only 60 percent of Catholics believe in a personal God. If the Church is to reverse these trends, the evangelizers must first be evangelized-in other words, Catholics-in-the-pew must make a conscious choice to know and follow Jesus before they can draw others to him. This work of discipleship lies at the heart of Forming Intentional Disciples, a book designed to help Church leaders, parish staff and all Catholics transform parish life from within. Drawing upon her fifteen years of experience with the Catherine of Siena Institute, Sherry Weddell leads readers through steps that will help Catholics enter more deeply into a relationship with God and the river of apostolic creativity, charisms, and vocation that flow from that relationship for the sake of the Church and the world. Learn about the five thresholds of postmodern conversion, how to open a conversation about faith and belief, how to ask thought-provoking questions and establish an atmosphere of trust, when to tell the Great Story of Jesus, how to help someone respond to God's call to intentional discipleship, and much more. And be prepared for conversion because when life at the parish level changes, the life of the whole Church will change.

An Inclusive Academy

An Inclusive Academy
Author: Abigail J. Stewart
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 026203784X

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How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand. Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world—in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members of the white male majority. Perhaps most important, Stewart and Valian provide practical advice for overcoming obstacles to inclusion. This advice is based on their experiences at their own universities, their consultations with faculty and administrators at many other institutions, and data on institutional change. Stewart and Valian offer recommendations for changing structures and practices so that people become successful in ways that benefit everyone. They describe better ways of searching for job candidates; evaluating candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion; helping faculty succeed; and broadening rewards and recognition.

Relationship-Rich Education

Relationship-Rich Education
Author: Peter Felten
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421439379

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A mentor, advisor, or even a friend? Making connections in college makes all the difference. What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships. Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience. Critics suggest that to build connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students. But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions. In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectation and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education. Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations. Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Education provides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts. Ultimately, the book is an invitation—and a challenge—for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.

Intentional Interruption

Intentional Interruption
Author: Steven Katz
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2012-10-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1412998794

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Break down the barriers that keep professional learning from sticking! Real professional learning takes place when there is a permanent change in practice. This book outlines what it means to intentionally interrupt the status quo in order to overcome barriers to learning that impede permanent change. The authors explain the psychological processes involved in learning and which biases get in the way of making professional learning stick. Staff developers will find tools and strategies for: * Moving professional learning beyond activities to deepen conceptual change* Enabling new learning by building three key capacities: a learning focus, collaborative inquiry, and instructional leadership* Embedding and sustaining a true learning culture in schools.

Mission and Place

Mission and Place
Author: Daniel R. Kenney
Publisher: Ace/Praeger Higher Education
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2005
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

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Details how a college campus can reinforce the three fundamental components of the institution: teaching and learning, creating community, and developing responsible citizens of society and the world.

The New Global Universities

The New Global Universities
Author: Bryan Penprase
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0691231486

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Reimagining higher education around the world: lessons from the creation of eight new colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America Higher education is perpetually in crisis, buffeted by increasing costs and a perceived lack of return on investment, campus culture that is criticized for stifling debate on controversial topics, and a growing sense that the liberal arts are outmoded and irrelevant. Some observers even put higher education on the brink of death. The New Global Universities offers a counterargument, telling the story of educational leaders who have chosen not to give up on higher education but to reimagine it. The book chronicles the development and launch of eight innovative colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America, describing the combination of intellectual courage, entrepreneurial audacity, and adaptive leadership needed to invent educational institutions today. The authors, both academic leaders who have been involved in launching ventures similar to the ones described, offer a unique inside perspective on these efforts. Bryan Penprase and Noah Pickus show how the founders of new colleges and universities establish distinctive brands in a sector dominated by centuries-old institutions, secure creative sources of funding, attract stellar faculty and students, and design appealing curriculums and campuses—all while managing tradeoffs and setbacks, balancing local needs and global aspirations, and wrestling with challenges to academic freedom. These new educational institutions include two universities in Asia and the Middle East built by well-established American parent institutions, others in Africa and North America that offer holistic reform from the ground up and leverage new technologies to lower costs, and still others that adapted the American liberal arts model to Asian and African contexts. Their experiences offer lessons for future founders of new universities—and for those who want to renew and rejuvenate existing ones.