Adult Education

Matthew Lynch published in Adult Education

Help! I Trash Talked My Partner on Text and Accidentally Sent It to Her

Introduction:

We’ve all experienced that sinking feeling when we realize we’ve made a mistake, but when it involves our partner and texting gone wrong, the stakes are particularly high. Picture this: you’re venting to a friend and inadvertently trash-talk your partner, but instead of sending it to your confidant, the message lands directly in your partner’s inbox. The consequences can be damaging for both sides. In this article, we’ll discuss how to approach this delicate situation and salvage your relationship.

1. Own Up to Your Mistake:

Take responsibility for what you did. You cannot change what happened, but you do have control over your own actions moving forward. Apologize sincerely and acknowledge how hurtful and disrespectful your words were, even if they were never intended for her eyes. Demonstrating humility and remorse is essential towards rebuilding trust.

2. Open Communication:

Encourage an open dialogue with your partner to discuss the contents of the message in question. Be honest about the context in which it was written and be willing to reveal the reasons behind those comments. Addressing these concerns together can uncover deeper issues that may need working on within the relationship.

3. Engage in Active Listening:

To truly understand your partner’s perspective and feelings, make sure you listen intently without interruption or defending yourself in the moment. Validate her emotions by acknowledging her pain, even if you think she might be overreacting.

4. Be Willing to Work on Yourself:

Show commitment towards self-improvement by recognizing any negative behavior patterns present in your relationship or communication style. Recognize that nobody is perfect and make a conscious effort to work on those areas in which you may have faltered.

5. Seek Professional Help If Necessary:

If this incident has significantly impacted your relationship, professional help from a couples therapist or counselor may be beneficial. They can provide guidance and support in mending the bond between you and your partner.

6. Rebuild Trust Over Time:

Bear in mind that repairing trust takes time and requires patience from both parties. Continue to demonstrate trustworthiness by remaining open, honest, and supportive with your partner during this healing process.

7. Learn From the Experience:

Take this unfortunate incident as a learning opportunity to grow both individually and as a couple. Be more mindful of your words, even in private conversations meant for others, as they can still hold the power to hurt those you care about.

Conclusion:

Accidentally trash-talking your partner can undoubtedly put a strain on your relationship. However, by approaching the situation with empathy, accountability, and communication, you can work towards restoring the trust between you. Remember to learn from your mistakes and use them as stepping stones for personal growth and building stronger connections in the future.

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Adult Education

Could a Messy Desk Make You a Better Teacher?

In a world that often prioritizes order and organization, it’s common to hear that a cluttered workspace is connected to similar states of mental chaos. However, highly successful people like Albert Einstein and Mark Twain have defied this idea, with famously messy desks of their own. This brings us to an intriguing question: could having a messy desk actually make someone a better teacher? A compelling argument can be made in favor of this perspective.

Enhancing Creativity

First and foremost, some researchers argue that disorganized environments stimulate creativity. In an environment that doesn’t adhere to strict order, the human brain may try to connect ideas in unconventional and novel ways. For teachers who need fresh approaches and creative lesson plans to captivate students’ attention and foster their curiosity, having a messy desk might act as a catalyst for these inventive solutions.

Breaking Stereotypes

Messy desks challenge stereotypes of how an effective educator should appear. For students who struggle with organization themselves, seeing their teacher’s messy desk might provide some comfort in knowing that being organized does not necessarily equate success. Teachers embracing their messiness send a message that everyone follows different paths to achievement.

When it comes to education, one size simply doesn’t fit all. By altering their environment to reflect this belief, teachers remind students that the classroom is open to experimentation, embracing differences in learning styles.

Nurturing Resilience

A messy desk can also encourage the development of resilience in both students and teachers. When faced with disarray, teachers learn adaptability—a valuable trait when challenges emerge unexpectedly in the classroom. Similarly, students can develop resilience by observing their teacher navigating challenges with ease amidst chaos.

Identifying Personal Strengths

Some educators work more efficiently in disorganized environments. A messy work area might allow them to focus on essential tasks without spending excess time locating documents or optimizing their physical space for performance. By embracing a messier desk, teachers find their unique stride, focusing on valuable skills and teaching methods rather than striving towards the myth of a perfectly organized space.

In conclusion, a messy desk could play a role in fostering creativity, breaking stereotypes, nurturing resilience, and helping teachers identify their personal strengths. While maintaining organization is often praised in various aspects of life—including education—it’s essential to recognize there isn’t a single blueprint for excellence. Teachers who thrive amidst clutter might truly be onto something; perhaps our appreciation for chaos as an incubator for growth is long overdue.

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Adult Education

Soft Skills: Everything You Need to Know

This encompasses all the non-academic skills that employees have to possess so as to succeed in their job roles. It should be crystal clear that the imminent automation of cars might not be translatable to the automation of the great personal work done by therapists, social workers, teachers, and so on in the nearest future.

This is because the jobs of the highlighted individuals in the last paragraph revolve around the utilization of soft skills, as demonstrated, for example, by the need for an oncologist to demonstrate empathy while explaining a cancer diagnosis and prognosis to patients and their family members.

Soft skills include the communication abilities, personality traits, and personal attributes required for success on the job. Individuals with good soft skills usually have strong emotional intelligence and situational awareness to navigate complicated working environments while still generating positive results.

Some of the most desired soft skills include:

Leadership skills: Organizations want employees who can direct and supervise other workers. They want employees who can foster relationships across the organizational chain. Leaders have to assess, encourage, discipline, and motivate workers and resolve conflicts, build teams, and cultivate the company’s desired culture. Comprehending how to influence individuals and accommodate their requirements is a crucial element of leadership.

Teamwork: Most employees belong to a team, division, or department, and even those who aren’t on an official team often need to collaborate with other employees. One may prefer to work alone, but it’s crucial to demonstrate that the person appreciates and comprehends the importance of working in partnership with other employees to achieve the company’s goals.

Communication skills: Successful communication includes five components. Verbal communication stands for a person’s ability to speak concisely and clearly. Nonverbal communication involves the ability to demonstrate positive facial expressions and body language. Written communication is a person’s skillfulness in composing reports, text messages, and other kinds of documents. Visual communication refers to a person’s ability to communicate information utilizing pictures and other visual aids. Active listening skills help a person listen to and truly hear what others say.

Adaptability: In the 21st century, organizations need to make drastic (and sometimes rapid) changes to remain competitive. So they want employees who can also change direction or shift gears as needed. As companies have become agile and less hierarchical over the last decade, it’s more crucial than ever for workers to be able to manage different tasks and display a willingness to take on responsibilities that may lay outside their area of expertise.

  • no reactions
0
Share
Ton Koenraad published in Adult Education, Digital Age Teachers, ESL & ELL, Language Education, Professional Development

EU project CATAPULT offers opportunities for Internationalisation, profiling and lifelong learning for LSP, L2, MFL and CLIL teachers

One of the results of the CATAPULT Project (Computer-Assisted Training And Platforms to Upskill Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) Teachers) is LinguaCoP, a Community of Practice platform.

With its resource bank, blogs and forum Linguacop supports knowledge development and practice sharing by language, LSP and CLIL teachers.

It also hosts ‘LinguaClick’  to support (freelance) LSP, but also L2 and MFL professionals to offer their services, also internationally. View this short presentation video to see what this online Community of Practice has to offer.

Furthermore the project also offers a free online course (MOOC, released on October 12, 2020) based on the project’s LSP competence framework.

It supports LSP teachers wanting to update their teaching skills and those language teachers interested in developing competences specific for LSP teaching. Watch this video to get a sneak peek at what course participants can expect.  Those interested can register here

For more details about these and other project developments see the online version of the latest Newsletter

Project website: http://catapult-project.eu Twitter: @ProjectCatapult

From Ton Koenraad on behalf of Catapult partner TELLConsult

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Adult Education, EdTech & Innovation, Education Leadership, Elementary Education, Personalized Learning

Teacher Leaders In the 21st Century

 

As we find ourselves standing on the fault lines of shifting paradigms in education question about how we lead and will be lead seem to surface with between each mini quake and aftershock. The reoccurring rumbles to develop a mindset and culture that embraces failing, thinking outside the box, and risk taking, feel shaky when they originate from a group specifically selected because of their lack of failure, ability to maneuver within the box, and their skill to mitigate risk. New pedagogies require that we follow differently as much as that we be led differently.

 

In a building or culture cultivating 21st-century teaching strong leadership will be more dependent upon open communication and honest feedback from trusted voices in the fray, lynch pins, teacher-leaders that are applying design thinking in real time, managing innovation in action, and proving the value of deep learning daily. One of the unexpected consequences of a personalized learning culture is that for the first time there are multiple paths to access the demonstrable power of teacher-leaders. Academia has grappled with how to harness the magic of master level classroom craftsmen for more than a decade now, moving them into administration, linking them to mentorships, and persuading them to present their work in various ways. While each of these routes has offered opportunity none has offered a way to capitalize effectively on the skill set that makes those classroom maestros as valuable as they are. However, in a 21st-century learning environment where the leadership is multi-directional teacher-leaders can become a celebrated conduit for what works, and testing ground for new best practices.

In a world obsessed with leadership skills and a profession built upon a limited hierarchy it can be easy to not recognize the necessarily complex infrastructure of successful schools. Educational institutions are what economist refer to as weak link systems1. A structure more dependent on the best performance of the weakest link. (ie: soccer teams rather than basketball teams, where the best player is dependent upon the skill of the lesser known players for success.)

As we explore the multitude of roles and aspects of leading a school or district in a digital age, where change is a constant theme and innovations and risks are goals then identifying, accessing and amplify those lynchpins is essential. As a district administrator explained it, “Personalized learning is a healthy virus we want to spread as systemically and infectiously as possible…” Leadership within this kind of educational system is then no longer a title it is a distributive model2.

 

 

Following that analogy through a slight modification of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Law of the Few,2 which theorizes that The success of any kind of academic epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of teacher-leaders with a particular and rare set of pedagogical gifts:

Marine: These are the first into any new challenge, idea, or program. They are the risk takers, the ones that can and will fall in the valiant effort to try new learning.

Maven:  Especially valuable in the digital age these are information specialists that know what apps and extensions are new, where to find the best list research on STEM projects and when AI will be ready for the classroom

Media Moguls: 87% of teachers are on some kind of social media, these are the ones on all kinds of social media. To go back to the epidemic analogy these are they carriers.

McGyvers: With an inherent understanding of how to hold extract the useful elements of any lesson and modify or even redefine them with digital wonderment.

The odds are good that you have these people sitting in hard chairs reading an email from you almost daily. These qualities are not in their personnel record, Finding them and allowing them to bring a whole new skill set

 

1:  http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465493-the-numbers-game

2: http://www.gettingsmart.com/2017/04/preparing-to-lead-in-a-project-based-world/

3: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2612.The_Tipping_Point?ac=1&from_search=true

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Adult Education, Higher Education

It’s time to reduce the number of PhD students, or rethink how doctoral programs work

This article was written by Gwilym Croucher

There are not enough academic jobs vacant in Australia each year to employ all our PhD graduates.

This imbalance risks training an increasing numbers of doctoral students on a promise that cannot be fulfilled: that is future academic employment.

We need to accept a hard truth that Australia needs to rethink the design of the PhD and the expectations around it, or radically reduce intake to doctoral programs.

In 2015, Australia graduated over 10,000 postgraduate research students – the vast majority of these were doctoral students. There were over 65,000 research higher degree students enrolled at Australian universities last year with most full or part time PhD students.

The number of PhDs in Australia will continue to grow. Enrolments in higher degrees have increased by almost half since 2001, and although much of this has been through more international doctoral students, domestic student numbers continue to grow year on year.

Most of these PhD graduates do not end up in a career of teaching or research at a university, or even teaching or research somewhere else.

There are currently over 50,000 staff employed in full-time or fixed-term academic roles in Australian universities. The number of positions vacant each year is nowhere near enough to accommodate even a small proportion of new Australia PhD graduates, let alone those who completed in prior years.

If the majority of PhD students, then, do not end up in ongoing academic employment, are designs for doctoral program right? Are student expectations realistic if they enter the degree with aspirations for a teaching and research career as many, perhaps most, do?

The Australian government recently accepted the excellent report from ACOLA on doctoral training. This looks at many of these challenges. There are broad issues related to research training and the academic workforce that the sector must now face.

Rethinking the PhD

There is a real need to think about the prospect of academic employment for PhD graduates. Much of the teaching in Australian higher education is delivered by sessional staff at universities.

Australian universities now depend on sessional teachers, short-contract researchers and other casualised and fixed-term staff to operate.

Many universities wouldn’t be viable without these staff. But for most academics, sessional employment is not a replacement for an ongoing position, offering little in the way of development of career progression.

Sessional work itself is not a problem unless it shows that many doctoral graduates find this as their only option. Or if it shows that students are being set up with unrealistic expectations of their future prospects for permanent academic employment.

We risk an unsustainable academic Ponzi scheme. This is not just an Australian trend, the US faces a similar challenge for large numbers of sessional staff.

But thinking through doctoral programs is more than just about managing PhD candidate expectations.

It is about doctoral training in a mode which combines the apprenticeship model, learning how to research, with more formal components of the other areas of learning that work in non-academic environments.

They need to be able to leverage the broad range of skills acquired through doctoral training, such as project management and strong writing skills.

Many students contribute as junior researchers to projects. This is critical to student research training and the overall research effort. However, to ensure they finish their degree with the right skills set will likely require a more diverse set of experiences and training. We need to avoid at worst viewing PhD students as a cheap research workforce.

Redesigning the PhD in Australia is a big task. It requires an ongoing discussion about enrolling such a large cohort of doctoral students who will not work in academia.

In an age of the innovation economy and government focus on thinking past the mining boom, there is much to be said for doctoral trained workers.

They are a great national resource to be celebrated, where time spent in PhD research is recognised for the skills developed beyond an area of deep expertise.

But the decisions we make now about how we train PhDs will be with Australia for a long time. If we don’t change, we need to consider training fewer of them.

The Conversation

Gwilym Croucher, Senior Lecturer, Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

  • no reactions
0
Share