08/21/2014 by @Sit_With_It - 0 comments

The Rejection Letter and Start to a New School Year

I’ve waited awhile before publishing this post. Waiting seems to be the standard advice on the Internet if one Google’s “rejected journal manuscript”…wait a few days and then consider the feedback and keep working on the document. That I did (and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for goodness from the new submission location!), although I waited longer to write this post. Mostly because I was still mulling around some of feedback I received. Additionally, it is hard to receive a rejection (This site indicates that there are four steps for responding to it…none of which apply to the kind of rejection I received). In this case, I am talking about the rejection of a journal submission, but I think rejection is painful to receive not matter the context (at least this is what I recall from school dances). This post, however, will focus on the feedback I received about a research paper I wrote.

As you know from another post (where I confessed that a part of my motivation to blog is to improve my writing), writing does not come easily to me. I have to work at it, and while I have improved due to my continued commitment, I know that I need to keep doing it. So, this blog will not be about the feedback I received related to my writing abilities. Although I do want to add that I received three positive comments about my writing (woo hoo! 🙂 ). Instead, this feedback will be about two similar comments I received regarding the results of the research I was reporting. Now, before I share more about the comments, please know that after spending time with them, I can see how the reviewers came to understand what I wrote in the way that they did. I actually agreed with what they wrote, and I believed that the research I was reporting did too, however, that is not what they read. Instead, they read that my research was incongruent with other, previously published research and they indicated that it should be rejected because of that, which is what got me thinking. Again, please keep in mind that this was not the case, but I still couldn’t help but wonder what if I had made a new discovery that was not congruent with the previously published research?

What if my research discovered something different?

It was clear to me that if that had indeed been the case, the two reviewers were not open to it. They did not even seem to notice that my research results section started off with a sentence indicating congruency (not opposition) to current research. So this got me thinking about what that might mean for the field of student affairs.

Are we so focused on what we’ve been doing that we have closed ourselves off to what is different and new?

This, to me, is a Thomas Kuhn question,

This video of Thomas Kuhn is hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-v_onEWGv0

You should go here though to learn more about his contributions: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions

and a question that I look forward to exploring with the students in College Student Personnel (CSP) program as a I start by fourth year as a faculty member tomorrow at Western Illinois University.

08/08/2014 by @Sit_With_It - 0 comments

T.J. the barred owl

If you’ve checked out my Facebook page the past two summers, you might have noticed a few posts identifying someone/thing named T.J. T.J. has been an unexpected surprise. T.J. is who I dedicated this blog entry to, as it is my last entry for the summer. I will start only posting every other week from here on out throughout the school year (oh yes, it is that time of year again!).

My partner and I moved into our house two springs ago. It is an old, funky house that we are enjoying fixing up. Included is a yard, which at move-in time had several more trees in it than it has now. (I am quite grateful for an uncle and mom who don’t mind helping out a couple of new homeowner’s take down dead trees.)

What the yard looked like when we purchased the house

What the yard looks like now…or rather in April of this year

Last summer, prior to most of the tree removal, I was sitting outside one summer’s evening talking to a friend on the phone. It was closer to the dark part of dusk, but warm enough to sit comfortably outside. As I was sitting there, I happened to notice a large bird fly, and land, on the for sale sign across the street from where I was sitting. I said to my friend,

“I think that I there is an owl staring at me.”

Instinctively, I ducked down a bit (the neighbor’s yard was about 25 feet away, but it felt as though it was closer to five), but kept on talking. About 20 minutes later, I suddenly saw a huge bird fly within five feet of me (this time, I’m not exaggerating–I swear!) and land in one of the two dead trees that is no longer in our yard. I abruptly ended my phone conversation, and crouching down, quickly went inside my house where I proceeded to look for the owl out the window.

The owl from the window…sorry it isn’t so clear

After a few minutes, the owl took off in flight again, which I would soon learn was just a quick trip to the top of our house. At that point, the owl started hooting. If you have never heard an owl hoot, they are much louder than you might think. This is a barred owl hooting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id2A8yC_JJY

Naturally, in my frightened stage I decided to google “owls attacking humans”, which I DO NOT recommend. Yes, this does mean that there have been reports of owls attacking humans (mostly in the Northwest from what I saw, and mostly due to humans running in the dark), which results in a series of rabies shots.

No. Thank. You.

So, I called out to my partner and told him that we were not going outside as long as the owl was there. I was anxious with my tone and frantic in my eyes while expressing this thought to him. His response, from the couch:

“Okay.”

I asked him if he had seen the owl, and if he had heard it hooting. His response:

“No.”

Disappointed that he wasn’t as riled up about the owl as I was, I retreated to the other room where my computer was, and proceeded to update my Facebook status with the owl citing news (I posted the above photo I took out the window). It was at this point, that I started to realize if I refuse to go outside for fear of the owl, I would never get to enjoy another comfortable summer night on the patio. So, I decided to do the only wise thing a person with a doctorate in Counseling and Personnel Services would do…I used my counseling skills to name my fear! 🙂 And, that is how the barred owl living just outside our front door acquired the name T.J. (please don’t ask what T.J. stands for…I’m not really sure. The name just came to me as a good name for an owl).

T.J.

Update to this summer: T.J. is back, but this time there are three T.J.’s, and I certain that their home is in the grove of trees across the street in the neighbor’s yard. I have not heard much hooting, but instead have heard hissing. Yep, that is right, owl’s hiss. This is what a barred owl hissing sounds like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHnU1fdLi_s

I’ve also gone one step further this year in applying my counseling skills. Not only do I still refer to the owl, well really all three of them, as T.J., but I’ve taken to watching them and talking to them using T.J.’s name (this way they learn it). Mostly, I just ask how things are going, and thank them for watching over everything.

T.J., T.J., and T.J.

I will say that I am not alone in spotting the owl this year. I’ve seen many a neighbor note and point to the owls. Once I even had a couple stop me while I was sweeping, and ask me if I was aware of a “big bird” flying around. I kindly responded that I was, and that there were three barred owls that lived here (I really wanted to tell them that the owls names were T.J., but I resisted 🙂 ).

08/01/2014 by @Sit_With_It - 0 comments

Innovation and Higher Education

Over the past week, I read the book The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. I’d read several other books about what he calls disruptive innovation theory, but not yet this book, so I decided that it was time. I am one of those faculty members (I did this when I was a student affairs professional too) that enjoys reading a book from another field and considering what it means for the field of higher education. The book is worth reading, although the amount of discussion about the disk drive industry and innovations with in it made me feel quite old. For example, I can remember when disk drives served floppy disks that looked like this:

And now disk drives serve disks that look like this:

One of the points, I’ve been spending some time with is that the cause of “every successful company’s ultimate demise” is,

“the two principles of good management taught in business schools: that you should always listen to and respond to the needs of your best customers, and that you should focus investments on those innovations that promise the highest returns” (p. xxxiv).

Although I am not a fan of likening higher education to a business in the manner that it is often done today (it seems such a narrow way of viewing a complex organization), I’m not one to fully throw out the entire idea. So, I’ve found it worthwhile to consider how these two principles of management are enacted in higher education…at least in relation to the experiences I’ve had.

The first principle, “that you should always listen to and respond to the needs of your best customers” I’ve most certainly heard within higher education. From time to time I also hear it from the students I teach.

“We must meet the students needs!”

The issue, for me, becomes do the students know what they need? For that matter, does anyone really know what they need? I know that I often think that I know what I need in the moment, but when looking back I more often see a much smaller list of necessary items than I originally put together. So, it seems that perhaps what we might be responding to are people’s wants disguised as needs. I also know that, from my experience, I can always need/want more. In fact, I’m not sure that I know too many people, myself included, that are quick to say, “no, no, that’s enough…I only needed that amount” of whatever it is that they are being given (hence my struggles with dieting).

Another issue I have with the principle, but again, one that I see being enacted in higher education has to do with responding “to the needs of your best customers”. I can certainly see how this can cause issues for any organization facing a disruptive innovation. After all, those that are not identified as your best customers, but that are still your customers, are not fully being considered. Thus, while they still might consume your product, they are being taken for granted. It doesn’t seem too far of a stretch to realize that when they find a place that will value their contributions more that they will go there. In a day and age when most institutions are facing retention issues this seems like a more high-risk way to keep students. In a day and age when higher education is being questioned about its purpose, this seems like a sure fire way to produce people who are dissatisfied and frustrated with their experience—especially if all that they have to do is glance around to see that the needs of others are being met.

The second principle, “that you should focus investments on those innovations that promise the highest returns” seems like a formula for stagnancy. After all, how do you know what the return rate of an innovation is if it hasn’t been put out to market? Furthermore, even if it has, and it is not showing a high return, perhaps that is simply because the right market has not been found (which means that it eventually will lead to a high return rate). So, while I can understand how it seems safe to focus on innovations one can anticipate will provide a high return, I can also understand why Christensen warns that,

“Experts’ forecasts will always be wrong” (p. 178).

Furthermore, what does this mean in terms of failure? Is it not okay for institutions of higher education to experience failure, which thus allows learning to occur? Is society okay with institutions of higher education failing? Imagine if such failures were approached primarily as learning opportunities instead of primarily as unacceptable. If it isn’t, I only see such practice teaching others that they must be perfect in all that they do, which seems incongruent with valuing the life-long learning, which is professed to be a purpose of higher education.

Perhaps enacting these principles, as I’ve experienced higher education do, means that a disruptive innovation is on the horizon for higher education.