Month: September 2014

Guest Post: Leadership Matters, So what’s the Matter with our Leadership Today?

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Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/09/29/guest-post-gavazzi-1/

I was recently having coffee with my friend and colleague Dean and Professor Steve Gavazzi to discuss the National Council on Family Relation‘s Future of Family Science task force [more on that in a future post] and I mentioned my series of blog posts on self-regulated learning and graduate education. Steve asked me – did you mention leadership training? I had to admit I hadn’t. I invited to Steve to do a blog post on leadership to round out my graduate education series. Steve did so in the context of the conversations happening about the future of family science at the national level. Enjoy!!

Stephen Gavazzi

Stephen Gavazzi

Leadership Matters, So what’s the Matter with our Leadership Today?

Growing attention is being given to the present and future state of Family Science. Witness for instance NCFR Executive Director Diane Cushman’s most recent article in the NCFR Report Magazine. Here and elsewhere, thought is being given to the need to better understand where our academic field is, and where it is going. In her thought piece, Cushman mentioned two articles that appeared in the most recent (July 2014) issue of Family Relations. One article by Hamon and Smith dealt directly with the strengths and limitations of the discipline of family science, while a second article by Hans focused attention on some of the field’s identity issues, including what it calls itself (family science, family studies, family relations, etc.). Along with several NCFR colleagues, I was invited by Family Relations editor Ron Sabatelli to respond to these two articles. My commentary, which appeared in the same issue of the journal as the Hamon and Smith and Hans articles, invited readers to focus their concentration on a number of issues related to leadership, as I believe that there is no bigger challenge to the family science field that has to be recognized and confronted today.

Here is a portion of what I stated in my commentary:

“Leaders will either insert themselves into the process of determining our destiny as a field, or else that future will be determined for us, and invariably by people who likely do not have the same appreciation for our field’s importance. To make this happen, we must become much more intentional about the way in which we develop and support the next generation of department chairs, deans, provosts, university presidents, and heads of professional organizations who quite literally will either make or break us as a discipline.”

Continue reading Guest Post: Leadership Matters, So what’s the Matter with our Leadership Today? →

Self-regulated Learning and Graduate Education: What Graduate Programs Should do Part 2

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Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/09/26/self-regulated-learning-and-graduate-education-what-graduate-programs-should-do-part-2/

Well, it is time for my final post in my series on self-regulated learning and graduate education. This series resulted in the following posts:

Today, I want to discuss the other key to a graduate program informed by self-regulated learning principles: goal setting and feedback. I just finished typing up our graduate students’ annual reviews.  You might remember that our end of the year report was what started me on my quest to consider what a graduate program informed by self-regulated learning would look like. I learned from my fabulous colleagues Chris Wolters and Shirley Yu that intrinsic motivation, which exists within the self and usually stems from a personal interest in a task, is much better for achievement than external motivation, which usually comes from an external entity setting the goal. Hence, the final key to a graduate program informed by self-regulated learning is goal setting and feedback, informed by intrinsic motivation primarily, with some extrinsic mixed in.

Continue reading Self-regulated Learning and Graduate Education: What Graduate Programs Should do Part 2 →

Self-regulated Learning and Graduate Education: What Graduate Programs Should do Part 1

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Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/09/19/self-regulated-learning-and-graduate-education-what-graduate-programs-should-do-part-1/

Today I want to wrap up my series on self-regulated learning and graduate education. I want to revisit my original question: “What information, tools, tasks, and activities could we provide to promote our graduate students’ learning, intellectual development, and achievement of their post-graduate school goals?”. Over a series of posts, I reviewed information and tools (writing skills, research skills, and presentation/teaching/media skills) to promote graduate student success. My posts on tools ended up discussing tasks and activities to master those tools as well, so look in those posts for those discussions.

If I had to sum up my series of posts, I think that the keys to a graduate program informed by self-regulated learning principles would be a focus on professional development and goal setting and feedback. I want to discuss both; in the post I am focusing on professional development.

After writing these posts, I have been reflecting on graduate training. Of the tools I identified that graduate students need, I think most graduate programs focus primarily on teaching students the scholarship of their field, and how to contribute to it, which would fall under the category of “research skills”. The other tools I identified are largely ignored in graduate training, unless an advisor takes it upon themselves to teach them: writing skills, presentation/teaching/media skills, and those parts of research skills that do not deal with conducting research (such as consuming research). I now believe all graduate programs should have the following, and that these could lead to improvements in graduate student achievement.

Continue reading Self-regulated Learning and Graduate Education: What Graduate Programs Should do Part 1 →

Tools to Promote Grad Student Success: Presentation/Teaching/Media Skills

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Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/09/09/tools-to-promote-grad-student-success-presentationteachingmedia-skills/

The final tool that graduate students need for success is presentation/teaching skills. This topic is often ignored in graduate programs – grad students are rarely taught how to teach before they are thrust in the classroom, and likewise, grad students are rarely taught how to make a good presentation, or practice presentations in front of others. I think that at this point, most universities with graduate programs have something like the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching that we have here at OSU. And, most of these centers have training programs for teaching assistants and graduate student teachers – I took the Penn State Course in College Teaching when I was in grad school.  Overall though, most graduate students are given very little guidance on how to become a great, or even adequate instructor. We have added professional development requirements to our graduate program, and one of the offerings was a course in college teaching. The course filled, and the students got a lot out of it. Why don’t more grad programs offer these courses, or require their students to take these kind of courses prior to graduation? Even for students who are more research focused and do not want to go on to academia, teaching training would help them in the long term as they will inevitably have to make presentations as part of their work.

photo credit: derekbruff via photopin cc

photo credit: derekbruff via photopin cc

Speaking of presentations, you can immediately tell at any academic conference that academics have not been trained how to do compelling presentations. For that matter, very few people have been. Someone in my social network runs a TEDx event, and from what I can see, she spends hours with people trying to help them make excellent, compelling presentations. So, I think that graduate programs could really benefit from having presentation training for graduate students. Perhaps these should be part of what is offered by teaching centers, but, tips could be given during brownbag presentations or during seminars that introduce students to graduate school. Even having a one hour meeting around conference season could be incredibly helpful for students. And, these presentation skill trainings could come back to really benefit the graduate program – if students give better presentations, they will craft more compelling job talks, and perhaps ultimately end up landing a better job, or at this point, any job. Because one metric by which graduate programs are evaluated is by whether, and where, they place their graduate students, the graduate program would benefit if more student landed any, and better, jobs.

Continue reading Tools to Promote Grad Student Success: Presentation/Teaching/Media Skills →