What does a PhD student do all week?  1

 January 26, 2015  

Whenever I tell people about my job as a PhD student they tell me that they could “never work on the same thing for four years!”.

Like doing your PhD is mindlessly slaving on one specific task, non-stop, for four years. I guess it’s one of the most common misconceptions about doing your PhD. While it is true that I am spending four years working towards one thing: my dissertation and defence, I am not working on one thing at all.

In fact, being a PhD student is a very diverse job with a lot of possibilities and quite some freedom to choose. After four (or three, or five) years, your dissertation needs to be finished, but it’s not like you can decide to start writing it on your first day.

 

Things that need to be done before you can finish your dissertation:

  1. You need to read about your subjectrequired-reading
  2. Your research needs to be planned
  3. Data needs to be collected
    1. Instruments should be developed (or found somewhere)
    2. You will spend time finding participants
  4. Data needs to be analysed (maybe you even need to spare some time for data cleaning)
  5. Results need to be interpreted
  6. And of course those results should be written down
    1. You will have to spend some time researching journals that you want to publish in
    2. You will spend endless hours polishing your text until it is perfect (although it never will be)
  7. You’ll have numerous meetings with your supervisor(s) to discuss all these different steps

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 PHD

5 Success Factors of Multilingual Universities  2

 January 15, 2015  

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As promised in our last blogpost, in this post we share our view on what makes multilingual universities a success:

1. Promote teaching and learning through multiple languages
There is sometimes a tendency to promote the idea that being a multilingual university today means adopting English as the main language of instruction and marginalising courses taught in the national language. This is not the vision of multilingualism we imagine. As mentioned in one of the responses to our previous blogpost, our concept of a multilingual university is one that supports teaching and learning in the national language and additional languages. Decisions as to which language is used in which course will depend on the needs of the students, the program goals and the University profile.

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 Higher education, Schools , ,

The Hagelslag Dilemma  3

 January 12, 2015  

Blog 1 - hagelslag 3

I’m standing in the supermarket. It is a rather large supermarket, but luckily I only have to be in one department. So, here I am, standing in front of a pile of boxes of chocolate sprinkles (“hagelslag”, in its Dutch term). The place has huge departments and lots of choice. I recently got hired to do research on boxes of hagelslag. Which makes me very excited, because I love hagelslag! I look at the shelves, no, I gaze in awe at the shelves, where piles and piles of hagelslag are exposed, hundreds and thousands of different kinds. Since I know nothing about hagelslag yet, I have to get a grip on the field I’m studying. I have to choose the right boxes of hagelslag to start with, otherwise it will take me ages to find some information. After all, I’m getting paid now to choose the appropriate boxes of hagelslag for my research. Where to start?? Read more

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 PHD

5 Reasons Why Monolingual Universities Will Fail  9

 December 16, 2014  

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Last November a celebration was held to laud 25 years of bilingual education in the Netherlands. A month earlier a so-called “Manifest voor het behoud van het Nederlands” was published by four Dutch university professors making a plea to stop the development of English language university programmes. This “manifest” obtained some support in the Dutch media, for example in Volkskrant writer Aleid Truijens’ piece “In het Engels haalt niemand zijn niveau”. As bilingual and international education researchers and teacher educators at Iclon, we want to share with you 5 reasons why we believe monolingual universities are doomed to fail.
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How to improve the speaking skills of individual pupils in secondary schools in classes of 30 pupils?  2

 December 16, 2014  

presentatie

Context
In September 2014 I started as a Ph.D-candidate at Leiden University (ICLON) in the context of the Dudoc-alfa program, supervised by Prof. Dr. Jan van Driel en Dr. Ir. Fred Janssen. The main purpose of the Dudoc-Alfa program is the improvement and innovation of foreign language acquisition in secondary schools.

Focus research: speaking skills
My research focuses on feedback on speaking skills in foreign languages. Many language teachers in secondary schools have difficulty paying attention to the performance of each pupil and adjusting their feedback on each individual. What type of feedback is effective, when and how to give?

Feedback: What, when, how?
If these are questions you are also interested in, as a teacher or as a researcher, please contact me to share your ideas, opinions, advices and wishes: devrind@iclon.leidenuniv.nl

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 PHD, Schools, Teacher education, teacher research 

PhD: What did my first year teach me?  7

 December 15, 2014  
This post is a first of a track where
ICLON PhD students want to share
their trip on the PhD-lane with you.
Hope you enjoy it!

 

As I only now, after more than a year doing my PhD, start blogging, I thought this topic would be the best way to get you a bit up-to-date on what I do and how I do it…

My PhD started in August 2013 and I went head first into it, immediately. The project at the school started running and I had to start up my research directly in order to track everything that was going on. Starting my PhD with taking my time reading, thinking what ways to go, sorting out my materials etc. was not applicable to me. For me, this meant instant decision-making. Later, timeslots opened up

to contemplate what I had been doing the past time, how it went, and how it all relates to what I want to and will be doing.

 

‘Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.’
Ben Kingsley

But I had to do it the other way around!

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 PHD 

Academic research by teachers – a huge research capital!  9

 August 18, 2014  

Like practitioners as clergy, lawyers or clinical psychologists, teachers are tightly linked to a practice which is mostly examined by outside researchers. Teachers have years of experience with working with different instructional methods, tools and formats. They are all experts in their school subject knowing which learning strategies their students apply and which misconceptions they have. And teachers have an accurate idea of the context in which they teach. With other words, teachers have developed practical wisdom about their practice, which is invaluable for research on this practice. And –last but not least- they have easy access to information about teaching and learning which is mostly unreachable for external researchers. Yet, academic research about teaching and learning is mostly done by the outside educational researchers, who do not possess these advantages. There might be two reasons why this is common practice. Firstly, educational research requires particular competencies that researchers have acquired and are absent in teachers. Secondly, outside researchers examine an extensive set of practices, which allows them to generate conclusions about these teaching practices. But aren’t these actually myths? And shouldn’t we think better of how academic research can take advantage of teachers’ experience with and access to their practice? And wouldn’t that be via research by teachers themselves?

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 Schools, Teacher education, teacher research 

Op weg naar een professionele leercultuur in school  2

 May 19, 2014  

Al tijden wordt in de nationale en internationale literatuur geschreven over de voordelen van een professionele leercultuur in scholen voor voortgezet onderwijs. Voordelen worden gezien voor de motivatie en tevredenheid van docenten in die school, maar ook voor hun kennis en kunde, de kwaliteit van hun onderwijs en daarmee de prestaties van leerlingen. In een sterke professionele leercultuur in een school wordt kennis en onderzoek geborgd en behouden en krijgen docenten professionele ruimte. Dit helpt om docenten vast te houden in het onderwijs. Toch slagen scholen er nog onvoldoende in om een dergelijke professionele leercultuur voor elkaar te krijgen. Read more

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 Schools ,

Pupil participation is not a favour to students, it is their right  7

 May 15, 2014  

Training teachers in such a way that they are able and willing to organize their teaching accordingly is therefore not a choice but an obligation.

 

Attention for pupil participation in education is slowly growing, but does need a boost, especially in teacher education. Not only because it is an obligation to young people, but also because education itself will profit. Read more

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Is Leiden keeping pace?  1

 May 13, 2014  

Is Leiden University, an institute with the reputation to value tradition, keeping pace with other higher education institutes in terms of innovative lecturing? I asked myself this question when talking with Technical University teachers at a study success seminar in Delft, early May 2014. Before going into details however, a brief motivation seems in place regarding the context in which this question arose; who is asking, and why? Read more

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 Higher education, Study success , , , , , ,
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