Author: Reporter

In some contexts, spring rush might refer to fraternities and sororities. Here, it refers to the ways calendars fill for April and early May. As the last couple of months of the academic year—summer is its own thing—these are when the “annual” deadlines tend to converge. This is awards season, events season, annual advisory board meeting season, faculty candidate interview season and conference season, all at the same time. This is also when student academic issues—dishonesty and/or possibility of failure—come to the surface. I don’t mean that as a complaint, exactly, though a slightly more even pace across the year…

What Is Performance Management Training? Performance management training helps managers and leaders gain skills to set goals, give feedback, evaluate performance, and support employee growth. It emphasizes fair, consistent, and data-driven practices that enhance both individual and organizational results. It’s important to understand the difference between performance management training and performance appraisal training. Performance appraisal training teaches how to conduct formal evaluations, like annual reviews. In contrast, performance management training covers a wider range of topics. It includes ongoing feedback, coaching, goal alignment, and continuous development. Similarly, performance evaluation training supports structured assessments, but it’s just one part of a…

Cardona will lead a wide-ranging committee to develop recommendations on how to improve the state’s career pathways. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Former education secretary Miguel Cardona will chair a new commission in Connecticut aimed at improving the state’s career pathways system, the state announced last week. Connecticut governor Ned Lamont signed an executive order last Thursday to create the Connecticut Career Pathways Commission. The panel will develop a five-year strategic plan that includes recommendations on how state leaders can improve and expand career pathways. The end goal, according to the news release, is “that Connecticut has a modernized career pathways system…

President Trump is again asking Congress to do what it has so far refused to do: gut federal research agencies that provide billions of dollars to colleges and universities. And he’s still pushing to eliminate the Education Department, another move lawmakers have rejected. The president released his budget request for the next fiscal year Friday. It shows he hasn’t fully backed down from proposals he presented to the Republican-controlled Congress for this fiscal year, most of which were rejected. However, he has walked back his requests in some areas, including reducing his proposed slash to the National Institutes of Health to…

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Each day, hundreds of rural south Texas high schoolers wake before sunrise to board vans that bump for miles over back roads, crossing ranch land and thickets of brush. Their destinations aren’t their local schools, but distant districts where specialized academies offer them training in nursing, teaching and welding, along with associate degrees. The students’ home districts — Agua Dulce, Premont, Brooks County, Freer and Benavides — used to operate separately. They had a shrinking student population, were unable to provide much career and technical…

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter When school districts sign contracts for educational technology, they typically buy a set number of licenses. The software company delivers the product and the district cuts a check. Whether students actually benefit or even use the tools doesn’t factor into it. Over the past few decades, that has generated a growing tension among parents and educators, who have begun questioning the very idea of ed tech. But a new kind of funding scheme may turn that dynamic on its head: A recent report finds that…

Don’t Let Your Learning Culture Quietly Fail What sort of learning culture do you have? If you have one, could anyone else at your organization describe it? Most can’t. Usually, that’s because learning culture centers on L&D rather than on learners. It gets measured by LMS usage, program completion rates, and activity metrics, none of which tell you if there was any impact at all. That’s a design flaw worth sitting with. It’s why proving ROI feels impossible and why influencing without authority feels like pushing water uphill. When the system is built around L&D’s outputs rather than closing real…

Not too far back, we revis­it­ed some Cold War pro­pa­gan­da that taught upstand­ing Amer­i­can cit­i­zens How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism. It’s a gem, but it has noth­ing on the 1954 film, The House in the Mid­dle. Select­ed for preser­va­tion in the Nation­al Film Reg­istry by the Library of Con­gress, the short doc­u­men­tary makes the ulti­mate case for clean­li­ness. Bring­ing view­ers to the Neva­da Prov­ing Grounds, the 12-minute film shows what hap­pens when clean, white hous­es are sub­ject­ed to heat waves from an atom­ic blast, ver­sus what hap­pens when a dingy, ill-kept house goes through the same drill. It turns out…

At Shenandoah Conservatory, interdisciplinary collaboration provides students with unique opportunities to expand their experience across the performing arts. This spring, the Dance Division lends its artistry to this season’s main stage opera of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hänsel und Gretel” by contributing original choreography to the production’s “Dream Pantomime” and “14 Angels” sequences. Adjunct Assistant Professor of Dance Jessie Li, M.F.A., leads the choreographic development of this section, working with student dancers to integrate movement into the operatic storytelling. The process began prior to scheduled rehearsals, with early phrase development and musical study shaping the foundation of the work. Inspired by the…

James Diddams, Providence When conservatives appeal to “Western civilization,” they are referring to everything they like that has ever come out of Europe and nothing they don’t like, with the…