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  • The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

    The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

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  • The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

    The Importance of Connection in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

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  • A joined up post-16 system requires system-level thinking combined with local action

    A joined up post-16 system requires system-level thinking combined with local action

    There have been so many conversations and speculations and recommendations aired about the forthcoming post-16 skills and education white paper that you’d be forgiven for thinking it already had been published months ago.

    But no, it’s expected this week some time – possibly as early as Monday – and so for everyone’s sanity it’s worth rehearsing some of the framing drivers and intentions behind it, clearing the deck before the thing finally arrives and we start digesting the policy detail.

    The policy ambition is clear: a coherent and coordinated post-16 “tertiary” sector in England, that offers viable pathways to young people and adult learners through the various levels of education and into employment, contributing to economic growth through providing the skilled individuals the country needs.

    The political challenge is also real: with Reform snapping at Labour’s heels, the belief that the UK can “grow its own” skills, and offer opportunity and the prospect of economic security to its young people across the country must become embedded in the national psyche if the government is to see off the threat.

    The politics and policy combine in the Prime Minister’s announcement at Labour Party Conference of an eye-catching new target for two thirds of young people to participate in some form of higher-level learning. That positions next week’s white paper as a longer term systemic shift rather than, say, a strategy for tackling youth unemployment in this parliament – though it’s clear there is also an ambition for the two to go hand in hand, with skills policy now sitting across both DfE and DWP.

    Insert tab a into slot b

    The aspiration to achieve a more joined up and functioning system is laudable – in the best of all possible worlds steering a middle course between the worst excesses and predatory behaviours of the free market, and an overly controlling hand from Whitehall. But the more you try to unpick what’s happening right now, the more you see how fragmented the current “system” is, with incentives and accountabilities all over the place. That’s why you can have brilliant FE and HE institutions delivering life-changing education opportunities, at the same time as the system as a whole seems to be grinding its gears.

    Last week, a report from the Association of Colleges and Universities UK Delivering a joined-up post-16 skills system showcased some of the really great regional collaborations already in place between FE colleges and universities, and also set out some of the barriers to collaboration including financial pressures causing different providers to chase the same students in the same subjects rather than strategically differentiating their offer; and different regulatory and student finance systems for different kinds of learners and qualifications creating complexity in the system.

    But it’s not only about the willingness and capability of different kinds of provider to coordinate with each other. It’s about the perennial urge of policymakers to tinker with qualifications and set up new kinds of provider creating additional complexity – and the complicating role of private training and HE provision operating “close to market” which can have a distorting effect on what “public” institutions are able to offer. It’s about the lack of join-up even within government departments, never mind across them. It’s also about the pervasiveness of the cultural dichotomy (and hierarchy) between perceptions of white-collar/professional and blue-collar/manual work, and the ill-informed class distinctions and capability-based assumptions underpinning them.

    Some of this fragmentation can be addressed through system-wide harmonisation – such as the intent through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) to implement one system of funding for all level 4–6 courses, and bringing all courses in that group under the regulatory purview of the Office for Students. AoC and UUK have also identified a number of areas where potential overlaps could be resolved through system-wide coordination: between OfS, Skills England, and mayoral strategic authorities; between the LLE and the Growth and Skills Levy; and between local skills improvement plans and the (national) industrial strategy. It would be odd indeed if the white paper did not make provision for this kind of coordination.

    But even with efforts to coordinate and harmonise, in any system there is naturally occurring variation – in how employers in different industries are thinking about, reporting, and investing in skills, and at what levels, in the expectations and tolerance of different prospective students for study load, learning environment, scale of the costs of learning, and support needs, and in the relationship between a place, its economy and its people. The implications of those variations are best understood by the people who are closest to the problem.

    The future is emergent

    Complex systems have emergent properties, ie the stuff that happens because lots of actors responded to the world as they saw it but that could not necessarily have been predicted. Policy is always generating unforeseen outcomes. And it doesn’t matter how many data wonks and uber-brains you have in the Civil Service, they’ll still not be able to plot every possible outcome as any given policy intervention works its way through the system.

    So for a system to work you need good quality feedback loops in which insight arrives in a timely way on the desks of responsible actors who have the capability, opportunity and motivation to adapt in light of them. In the post-16 system that’s about education and civic leaders being really good at listening to their students, their communities and to employers – and investing in quality in civic leadership (and identifying and ejecting bad apples) should be one of the ways that a post-16 skills system can be made to work.

    But good leaders need to be afforded the opportunity to decide what their response will be to the specifics of the needs they have identified and be trusted, to some degree, to act in the public interest. So from a Whitehall perspective the question the white paper needs to answer is not only how the different bits of the system ought to join up, but whether the people who are instrumental in making it work themselves have the skills, information and flexibility to take action when it inevitably doesn’t.

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  • One Aus university in top 50 THE rankings – Campus Review

    One Aus university in top 50 THE rankings – Campus Review

    Australia’s universities have charged up the global leaderboard in a year where many of their international peers lost ground, according to a world-renowned tertiary rankings list.

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  • Universities in the age of intelligent machines – Campus Review

    Universities in the age of intelligent machines – Campus Review

    When Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called ‘godfather of AI’, declared in 2016 that ‘we should stop training radiologists now,’ his warning caused a stir.

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  • Students on the UQ experience – Campus Review

    Students on the UQ experience – Campus Review

    University of Queensland pro-vice-chancellor of education and student experience Suzanna Le Mire hosted a student panel at the Queensland Commitment summit in October.

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  • We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    If you’ve heard Jacqui Smith interviewed since she became minister, you’ll know that she’s been saying that the Skills and Post-16 White Paper has been nearly ready for quite some time.

    It may well be the case that most of the contents of the paper have been pretty much locked in for a good while, with others added to the work in progress as the need became apparent.

    And it isn’t just a Department for Education thing. Every part of government will have had an input, both during the formal “write round” that has just concluded and earlier in policy development. The launch will be in the government’s grid – lines will be agreed across Number 10 and the Cabinet Office.

    And there will be a story to tell. Which is where we find our problem.

    Big P

    The most common criticism leveled against Keir Starmer, by his own party more than anyone, is his inability to sell a big picture. Starmer, like many attracted to public policy and public service, is into details, implementation, and delivery. If five to ten years ago our politics was dominated by grand narratives (Brexit, the whole Boris Johnson thing, Liz Truss’ persecution complex), Sunak and Starmer both came to power with more than a whiff of “the grown ups are back in the room”. Delivery rules, ideology drools.

    There’s any amount of polling that suggests much of the frustration among voters is due to things just not working as well or as smoothly as they should. From getting an appointment with a GP, to getting support for a child struggling at school, to getting a dangerous pothole fixed it can feel like the UK is riven with structures and processes on the point of collapsing.

    A part of this is underinvestment – since 2010 funding for local government (which is responsible for the potholes and the pupil support) has collapsed, while growing funding for the NHS (which is responsible for the GP) has not covered increases in demand and has been blunted by numerous top-down reorganisations.

    But a part of this is an inability to do the hard yards on delivery, something which Starmer and Labour are keen to fix. Admirable intentions, but it is much harder to explain to people that we are at the start of a long, complex, and difficult process of renewal than to make absurd promises, stir up xenophobia, and have people believe that these days you can get arrested and put in jail just for saying you are English.

    Even delivery needs a story. Tony Blair, for all his myriad faults as a human being, was your archetypal get-you-one-that-does-both. But that is a rare skillset. The rest of us flounder making dull but important stuff sound interesting and inspiring.

    And so the story begins

    The opportunity mission in the Labour election manifesto highlighted a focus on improving the life chances of children, right the way through from pre-school to entering the workforce. In government, the formal measure of the success for this area of work is the proportion of young people in education or employment-with-training, and the number achieving higher level qualifications.

    Sounds like a set of indicators in need of a target? It doesn’t take a huge strategic leap to read across from this to the Prime Minister’s announcement at conference: a target of around 60 per cent (or two thirds, it all depends which announcement you read) of young people in higher education or a “gold standard” apprenticeship.

    That’s not a target that, if read strictly by the numbers, has much to do with “widening access” as traditionally described: there’s no sub-targets for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. For that we look at Bridget Phillipson’s preview of the decision to reintroduce targeted grants (ignoring for the moment the plan to fund them via an international student fee levy).

    But this is unlikely to be the only intervention that is aimed directly at widening access. We know now that V levels – a BTEC-esque option that will sit between very academic A levels and apprenticeship-like T levels – will add another option to the choices offered aged 16, hopefully keeping more people in education for longer.

    Even though the opportunity mission focuses on young people, we also know that the government is concerned with what we might call “adult skills”. Over in the economic growth mission is where find all the stuff about Skills England and training providers. What we don’t find – even though it by rights should be there – is the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, a Boris Johnson policy of letting adult learners access student loan style finance which ended up accidentally re-writing the entire basis of student loan finance.

    Another Johnson-era policy that plays in here are the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which help local employers ensure that their prospective employees are given the opportunity to develop the skills they need. Supposedly Skills England adds the national perspective on these local plans, helping to design identified skills needs into wider initiatives like apprenticeship standards and qualification design.

    Universities and higher education don’t exactly jump off the page of either of these missions. Accordingly, policy interventions in the sector have been minimal. The inflationary fee increase was a simple matter of letting existing information work in the way it was originally intended. The changes to implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was simply a matter of removing the actually insane components of an otherwise largely pointless piece of legislation.

    Vote reform

    But there was another early intervention – a letter from Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson that has become known as the “HE reform” agenda (not to be confused with the “HE reform” consultation from 2022, that almost established student number controls based on minimum eligibility requirements). It was a series of asks for the sector, perceived as a quid pro quo for the return of the inflationary fee increase.

    In essence this had five components. Let’s use the minister’s exact words:

    • Play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students
    • Make a stronger contribution to economic growth
    • Play a greater civic role in their communities
    • Raise the bar further on teaching standards, to maintain and improve our world-leading reputation and drive out poor practice
    • Underpinning all of this needs to sit a sustained efficiency and reform programme

    What’s interesting here is the absence of targets. Phillipson wants a stronger role, a stronger contribution, a greater role, a raising of the bar – but how far and how high, and how will she know when she has what she wants? It is a fair guess that we are due some numbers on these aspirations.

    The other thing to pull out here is the relationship between the regulator and the government. In England, most of these HE reform requests involves work that sits under the Office for Students (I’m happy to accept written submissions suggesting that Research England has oversight on elements of economic growth and the civic role).

    A pattern that I’ve recently been noticing is that OfS and DfE to not appear to be moving in sync at the moment – a DfE consultation on franchise arrangements appeared shortly before a largely unconnected OfS consultation on the same topic, OfS appeared to be startled by the appearance of its own guidance letter, and the biggest thing OfS has done recently – the mega-consultation on quality – appears to have blindsided DfE.

    So achieving the HE reform objectives (however loosely specified) also involves regulatory reform. And that regulatory reform appears to be closely tied to the Behan review.

    Quality Behan-cement

    Towards the end of the last government it was open season on reviewing the Office for Students. The Department for Education conducted a (largely unhelpful) legislative review of the way HERA was working in 2022, which spurred the House of Lords Industry and Regulators committee to foreground some of the more egregious failings of the OfS. The Behan review, which built on the findings of both, was one of the periodic reviews of regulators that usually pass without notice – what was notable was that the review author proceeded to take over as interim chair after the sad loss of James Wharton from public life.

    Behan’s review was focused on making regulation work better – focusing on efficacy, accountability, governance, and efficiency. It is the source – for example – of the plans to bring together the Teaching Excellence Framework and the B3 conditions of registration into a single quality assurance system. This modified and expanded TEF will, in future, feed into the eligibility of providers to access certain funds and opportunities – in particular the ability to offer Lifelong Learning Entitlement modules.

    Much of Behan was predicated on changes to primary legislation – the contradictions and confusion within HERA was getting in the way of a streamlined regulatory approach. We’ve been over some of the possibilities of tidying up legislation on the site before – it’s niche stuff unlikely to raise pulses outside of Wonkhe’s most devoted readership. And it would be a brave government that promoted a glossy higher education and skills bill devoid entirely of policy – imagine, given the mess the sector is in, trying to front out legislative proposals that basically amount to letting the OfS board choose the chief executive rather than the secretary of state?

    The question of regulation has also hit the headlines with an onslaught of problems with franchising. Currently students can be registered at one provider and taught elsewhere, with the quality of that teaching (and the outcomes experienced by those students) falling outside of the OfS’ ambit. There are both OfS and DfE proposals designed to address this issue – a DfE consultation required that teaching partners over a certain size needing to be registered with OfS, and an OfS consultation called for new conditions of registration for registering partners.

    The frustration is palpable – with DfE recently called out by the courts for riding roughshod over due process in order to censure Oxford Business College, and the National Audit Office calling on OfS, DfE, and the Student Loans Company to get their act together in addressing instances of student loan fraud. The regulatory toolkit is simply not up to the job.

    Fun with funding

    OfS, meanwhile, has very much been thinking about funding – a quietly radical change to the collection rules for HESES (the means by which we get the student number information that underpins most of the remaining direct OfS grants), adding in some very detailed information on subjects, prefigures a forthcoming consultation on how it uses the money (just under £2bn) it still allocates for high-cost subjects and student premiums.

    Any subject based approach, when it appears, will surely be informed by the government’s own list of priority subjects – found (again) within the eligibility rules for the LLE, and ported across to the eligibility of some students from deprived backgrounds for new maintenance grants. For all the talk of a data-driven Skills England, and detailed information on precise employer demands, the list is broad. We’re broadly in STEM world, plus architecture (but not landscape gardening), nursing and allied health, and economics. And not medicine.

    Meanwhile, university finances have reached the stage where the only reliable source of income is via recruiting international students. This approach took a knock with changes to dependent visas for most students, but now the government has decided that it wants a slice via a levy – which will be used (in part) to support these new maintenance grants.

    With both provider and student finances at breaking point (genuine financial hardship, attrition, job losses, course cuts), there doesn’t appear to be any appetite for a meaningful rethink of funding in either case. Despite everyone yelling about nothing else since the pandemic, it appears to be the one thing that is definitely off the table in the short to medium term.

    Pieces of paper

    A white paper is a consultation – it is a selection box of policies and plans pulled together to present the next chapter of the government’s narratives on opportunities, skills, and the economy. It will certainly contain measures designed to address the knotty technical and implementation issues described above, but it also requires an element of vision.

    On one level, there is clearly a – very broad – skills vision. The language of opportunity, and of parity of respect for academic and vocational routes, is a rich and resonant one. It is no coincidence that every UK government for the past decade as used a version of this narrative, and it has been duplicated (with a few tweaks) across the ideological spectrum precisely because it is so powerful. However, an increasingly prominent component of this story has been positioned as a critique of the current state of affairs, and the plight of our universities and wider higher education sector. Despite the diversity of the sector, it is specifically universities – and a particular, largely inaccurate popular perception of universities – that are being seen as a problem on the way to a skills-led solution rather than an underfunded and struggling keystone.

    While the policies over every party have elements of this counter-narrative too – the Labour variant is perhaps kinder than the alternatives (see, for example, Badenoch). But it is not a full-throated defence of the sector. It is not simple or straightforward to draw together the various things Labour has done in the higher education space and tell a convincing story that includes a theory of change and a desired end state.

    So, while it is fairly straightforward to parse the hints and directions of travel that the past 18 months have brought into a series of likely next steps, the fact that none of these steps do much to inspire suggests that this can’t be the whole story. If it was, we’d be looking at a series of uncontroversial pieces of secondary legislation and some changes to the regulatory framework.

    The format of a white paper demands a little more.

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  • RIFs rip through federal Office of Special Education Programs

    RIFs rip through federal Office of Special Education Programs

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    During this tumultuous year at the U.S. Department of Education that saw about half of the 4,133 employees leave due to layoffs, buyouts and early retirements, the staff at the Office of Special Education Programs stayed mostly stable.

    That changed on Friday, however, when the Trump administration issued reduction-in-force notices across the federal government, including at the Education Department. Court filings show that 466 employees at the Education Department were impacted and several special education association leaders say most of the OSEP staff was laid off. 

    On Friday, the department’s press office confirmed that the RIFs affected staff at the Education Department but did not provide more details. 

    The National Association of State Directors of Special Education, in a statement on Sunday, said informal reports that NASDSE believes to be true indicate that only the two most senior staff remain in OSEP and just one staff member remains in the Rehabilitation Services Administration. Both offices are part of the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

    NASDSE said it was “confused and concerned” by the staffing changes, adding that the Education Department under the Trump administration has repeatedly said it supports federal funding and implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and special education for children with disabilities.

    “These RIFs, if true, will make it impossible for the Department to fulfill those responsibilities,” the NASDSE statement said. “There is significant risk that not only will Federal funding lapse, but children with disabilities will be deprived” of a free, appropriate public education.

    Like NASDSE, several other organizations in the special education field wondered how the Education Department would support special education services across the country with such a limited staff.

    “The rumored near elimination of the Office for Special Education Programs is absolutely devastating to the education of people with disabilities,” said Chad Rummel, executive director of the Council for Exceptional Children, in an email on Saturday.

    Rummel said OSEP’s oversight, technical assistance and accountability efforts are critical to supporting the implementation of IDEA, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next month. About 8.4 million infants, toddlers, children and young adults received services under IDEA in 2023.

    “Eliminating federal capacity to support IDEA is harmful to people with disabilities, their families, and the professionals who serve them, and it runs counter to everything our members work toward every day,” he said.

    Myrna Mandlawitz, policy and legislative consultant for the Council of Administrators of Special Education, said on Sunday that the OSEP staff reductions will put an “extreme burden on states and locals that are already really stretched.”

    IDEA, Mandlawitz noted, is implemented collectively by local, state and federal agencies. The federal staff reductions take away “one very vital piece of the partnership. It’s just hard to understand how it can possibly function,” she said.

    Promises to protect special education

    The RIFs came two weeks into the federal government shutdown that began Oct. 1 as Congress remains at a funding impasse for fiscal year 2026. During the shutdown, the Education Department planned to furlough about 95% of its non-Federal Student Aid staff for the first week, according to a Sept. 28 memo from U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

    Federal staff are not paid during a government shutdown, but typically receive retroactive compensation. However, there are reports that the Trump administration may try to withhold back pay for this current shutdown, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing over 820,000 workers in nearly every agency of the federal government.

    McMahon said in the memo that school systems could still draw down federal grants awarded over the summer and processing would continue for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Title I and IDEA grants would be distributed as well.

    However, the agency is pausing Office for Civil Rights investigations, new grant-making activities and technical assistance support during the shutdown.

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  • Advanced Teaching Roles Program Shows Improved Test Scores, but Faces Funding Concerns – The 74

    Advanced Teaching Roles Program Shows Improved Test Scores, but Faces Funding Concerns – The 74


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    North Carolina’s Advanced Teaching Roles program, which allows highly effective teachers to receive salary supplements for teaching additional students or supporting other teachers, is having positive effects on math and science test scores, according to an evaluation presented by NC State University’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at the State Board of Education meeting last week.

    Since 2016, the ATR initiative has allowed districts to create new career pathways and provide salary supplements for highly effective teachers — or Advanced Teachers — who mentor and support other educators while still teaching part of the day. Their roles include Adult Leadership teachers, who lead small teams and receive at least $10,000 supplements, and Classroom Excellence teachers, who take on larger student loads and receive a minimum of $3,000 supplements. 

    Those in adult leadership roles teach for at least 30% of the day, lead a team of 3-8 classroom teachers, and share responsibility for the performance of all those teachers’ students. Classroom excellence teachers are responsible for at least 20% more students than before they enter the role.

    “Our ATR program was designed to allow highly effective classroom educators to reach more students and to support the professional growth of educators,” said Dr. Callie Edwards, the program’s lead evaluator, at the State Board of Education meeting last Wednesday. “ATR aims to improve the quality of classroom instruction, the recruitment and retention of teachers, as well as ultimately impact student academic achievement.”

    In the 2024-25 school year, 26 districts operated ATR programs across 400 schools — 56% of which were elementary schools — employing 1,494 Advanced Teachers who supported nearly 4,000 classroom teachers statewide, according to the evaluation. Edwards said that 88% of Adult Leadership teachers received at least $10,000, and 85% of Classroom Excellence teachers received $3,000 or more.

    Statistical analysis of the 2023-24 school year’s data found that students in ATR schools outperformed their peers in non-ATR schools in math and science, showing statistically significant learning gains. 

    “Across the various programs I’ve evaluated, these are positive results — especially in math and science — where the impact of ATR is equivalent to about a month of extra learning for students,” said Dr. Lam Pham, the leading quantitative evaluator. “The results in ELA are positive but not statistically significant, which has been consistent for the last three years,” Pham said, referring to English Language Arts.

    These effects on math and science grow over time, according to the evaluation. Math scores improved throughout schools’ first six years of ATR implementation — though they are no longer significant by the seventh year of implementation, according to the presentation. For science scores, statistically significant gains began in the fifth year after schools began implementing ATR.

    Additionally, math teachers in ATR schools reported higher EVAAS growth scores than their peers in comparable schools.

    Teachers in ATR schools also reported feeling like they have more time to do their work compared to teachers in non-ATR schools.

    This year’s report featured data on teachers supported by ATR teachers for the first time. The evaluation found no positive effects on test scores for students taught by supported teachers compared to students taught by teachers who are not in the program. The researchers also found no effect on turnover levels for teachers supported by Advanced Teachers. However, the report says additional years of data will be necessary to verify if those effects appear over time.  

    The evaluation recommended that principals in ATR schools should foster collaboration and communicate strategically about the program with staff, beginning during Advanced Teachers’ hiring and onboarding.

    “It’s important to integrate ATR into those processes,” Edwards told the Board. “That means introducing Advanced Teachers to new staff and making collaboration, especially mentoring and coaching, a structured part of the day.”

    Edwards said these practices have been adopted in some schools, but principals reported needing more time and support to build collaboration opportunities into the school schedule.

    The report also urges district administrators to coordinate with Beginning Teacher (BT) programs, advertise ATR in recruitment materials, and improve their data collection practices. It also calls on state leaders to standardize the program to ensure consistency across participating districts.

    “Districts need standardized messaging, professional learning opportunities, and technical assistance to support implementation,” Edwards said. “The state can also create more opportunities for districts to share what’s working with one another and expand the evaluation beyond test scores to capture things like classroom engagement, social, emotional development, and feedback from teachers and principals.”

    The evaluators also said “there’s more to do” to expand the program in western North Carolina after Board members raised concerns about uneven participation across the state’s regions.

    2026-27 participants

    After the Friday Institute’s presentation, Board members heard a presentation on proposals for the next round of districts to join the ATR program from Dr. Thomas R. Tomberlin, senior director of educator preparation, licensure, and performance.

    Tomberlin said DPI received 15 proposals representing 22 districts. These proposals have been evaluated by seven independent evaluators, Tomberlin said. The Board had to choose the program’s next participants by Oct. 15 to comply with a legislative requirement. 

    The state can only allocate $911,349 for new implementation grants in 2026-27 — less than one-sixth of the funding required to fund all applications. That level of funding is “very low” compared to previous years, Tomberlin said. In the 2023-25 state budget, the General Assembly appropriated $10.9 million in recurring funds for these supplements in each year of the biennium.

    Tomberlin recommended that the Board approve the three highest-scoring proposals for the 2026-27 fiscal year, and fund these districts at 85% of their request. If the Board approves this recommendation, the state would still have $37,981 in planning funds left over for districts approved during the 2026 proposal cycle.

    Tomberlin said districts are already struggling to pay for the program’s salary supplements. The Friday Institute’s report showed that, despite the high median supplements, some districts are offering supplements as little as $1,000.

    “Some districts are not able to pay the full $10,000 because they have more ATR teachers than the funding that we can give them in terms of those allotments,” Tomberlin said. “And we had requested the General Assembly, I think, an additional $14 million to cover those supplements, and we didn’t get any.”

    The Senate’s budget proposal this session included funds to expand the ATR program over the biennium, while the House proposal did not. The General Assembly has not yet passed a comprehensive state budget, and its mini-budget did not include ATR program funding.

    Tomberlin said DPI would be in touch with the three districts to verify if they can proceed with the program despite limited funding.

    This article first appeared on EdNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


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  • Connecting Birds, Grief, and Communities

    Connecting Birds, Grief, and Communities

    This week, I got to welcome Clarissa (Rissa) Sorensen-Unrue back to Teaching in Higher Ed. She’s been on a few times in the past, exploring critical pedagogy; intersectionality, power, and pedagogy; and about the wonderful learning made possible through the MYFest community. This time, Rissa was joined by her sister, Christy Albright. They both shared about their unique (and some shared) experiences with grief and how it has shaped and formed them.

    Why write about grief, when discussing communities, as part of this week’s Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop, led by Harold Jarche?

    Grief can be such a lonely experience. Yet there are opportunities to feel less alone through the power of community. I’ve witnessed the ways that networks have helped people with disabilities navigating difficulties with access or inclusion, grieving parents who have lost a child, and connecting those who are looking to advocate for chance in higher education. Harold Jarche quotes Ronald Burt, author of Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal, in this week’s reading:

    It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.

    Getting Started with Mastodon

    Jarche then invites us to set up and share our Mastodon profile, which we will be using throughout the workshop. I already had one set up on Mastodon.Social (a larger instance of Mastodon): bonni208, as usual, so this was relatively easy for me. Originally, Dave had set us up on a unique Mastodon instance. Ultimately, we decided that it wasn’t worth the expense for us to do so and now we’re both on a larger instance.

    If my description of instances are getting confusing, Jarche suggests: Dear Friend: Let’s Talk About Mastodon.

    I’m still mourning the loss of community I used to experience on Twitter. First, I went radio silent and ultimately decided to delete my entire account. When discussing communities, that’s one of the things we’re warned against. If we put our metaphorical eggs in one basket and something happens to that basket, there’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. I was able to move some the people I followed over to other platforms, but it isn’t at all the same as it once was.

    Many people find themselves on newsletter and social media platforms that are misaligned with their values. Then, there’s all the work with how to navigate that cognitive dissonance. This is messy business. I would advocate holding yourself to high standards as you’re making decisions about where to farm and nurture your communities, but to be gentle with others who are in the process of making their own decisions about where to engage.

    I know Harold and plenty of others aren’t a fan of Bluesky, for reasons of replicating the issues many of us faced when investing so much on Twitter back in the day. However, that’s been the closest experience I’ve had to some aspects of community I used to get to enjoy. I like that they have starter kits (thank you for all the bird starter kits, people of the internet) and that my feed has a mix of hard-to-read-yet-important stories, satire and humorous posts, and then there are the birds. Many, many birds.

    Note: As I gather a few more links for this piece from my Raindrop.io bookmarks, I see that there is a way to: Roll Your Own Mastodon Starter Kits, thanks to Alan Levine’s ongoing contributions to my learning over many years now.

    Fact Checking Bird-Related Claims

    Speaking of birds, when I was talking with Rissa and Christy, I mentioned something about not having fact checked an Instagram post, but enjoying the idea of when we listen to bird song, that the experience can be associated with positive health benefits. Before finishing the show notes for that episode, I figured I had better do my due diligence and assess the veracity of that claim. Using Mike Caulfield’s Deep Background: Fact Checks and Context GPT,

    In the first round of fact checking, the GPT stated that a fact checker might say that this statement is “mostly true.”

    Strong evidence shows short-term relaxation and mood benefits from hearing birdsong, including reduced anxiety/paranoia versus urban noise. Broader or lasting “health benefits” (physiological and clinical) are plausible but less well established for birdsong specifically and should be qualified.

    Another Round

    When I followed Caulfield’s advice and typed: “another round” in the text box, more nuance emerged. Note the parentheses in the following text, which indicates what is new in this follow up query:

    What’s new here is marked (NEW).

    What changed / what we learned this round

    • We found a credible conflicting lab study (Hedblom 2019) reporting no significant physiological stress-recovery benefit from bird-song masking in a traffic-noise context—suggesting that some of the stronger “health” claims (physiology) don’t always replicate when visuals and context are controlled. 
    • Two different angles refine the claim: (1) not all birds are equal—e.g., crow calls lower restorativeness scores relative to other species; (2) the mix with urban noise matters—bird/stream sounds may reduce annoyance only when traffic noise isn’t perceptually dominant. These both caution against blanket statements and point to designable soundscapes (what species? what mix?). 
    • Net effect: support for short-term mood/annoyance relief remains strong (Urban Mind; Stobbe; Buxton), but broad physiological or long-term clinical benefits from listening to birdsong alone remain unproven or context-dependent, and species/mixture effects are meaningful. 

    Pattern to note

    • Higher-quality, controlled lab studies split: some show physiological recovery with general nature sounds (often water + birds), while others show null effects for birdsong specifically—especially when traffic noise is present or visuals drive recovery. Reviews also warn about conflating “birdsong” with “being in nature.” This pattern suggests the moderate claim is well supported, while the strong claim needs tighter, preregistered trials parsing species, diversity, and noise context.

    Context Report

    Finally, I followed Caulfield’s guidance to type “context report” for a summary and can share the following results.

    Core Context

    • The claim is often presented as “listening to birdsong relaxes people and produces other health benefits,” which can imply broad, causal, even physiological effects; reviews caution that many studies are short, context-dependent, or conflate “birdsong” with being in nature generally. 

    • In real-time diary research using the Urban Mind app, moments when participants reported seeing or hearing birds were associated with higher mental wellbeing, with benefits persisting to the next check-in; this is strong evidence of association but not proof of causation. 

    • A randomized online experiment (~6 minutes of audio) found that birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia relative to traffic noise; depression decreased only with a higher-diversity birdsong track, and there were no cognitive gains—supporting short-term mood benefits rather than sweeping health effects. 

    • Evidence syntheses indicate natural sounds overall improve affect and reduce stress/annoyance, with birdsong showing particularly strong links to stress/annoyance relief; these findings speak to psychological states more than durable clinical outcomes. 

    • Not all studies find physiological benefits from birdsong: in a controlled lab study, masking traffic with birdsong did not improve physiological stress recovery versus traffic or silence, suggesting context and modalities matter. 

    • Species and soundscape context shape effects: crow calls score low on perceived restorativeness, and the ability of birdsong to temper annoyance depends on how dominant traffic noise is in the mix—underscoring that “birdsong” is not a single, uniform stimulus.

    I felt that note about crow calls hard. Real hard. 😅

    Back to the Birds

    Finally, I could hardly do all this writing and thinking about birds without brining up my colleague Ludmila Praslova’s book: The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work. The community Ludmila has fostered on LinkedIn to help organizations “transform toxic cultures into thriving ones-reducing moral injusry, unlocking neurodivergent brilliance, and turning inclusion into innovation and belonging into business success,” is a great example of the power of networks.

    Ludmila holds a copy of her book: The Canary Code
    Dr. Ludmila Praslova holds a copy of her book: The Canary Code

    Until next time…

    …and here’s a long list of sources, which I thought seemed appropriate, given what we’re fact checking in this post.

    Bibliography

    • Alvarsson, J. J., Wiens, S., & Nilsson, M. E. (2010). Stress recovery during exposure to nature sound and environmental noise. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 7(3), 1036–1046. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph7031036
    • Annerstedt, M., Jönsson, P., Wallergård, M., Johansson, G., Karlson, B., Grahn, P., Hansen, Å. M., & Währborg, P. (2013). Inducing physiological stress recovery with sounds of nature in a virtual reality forest—Results from a pilot study. Physiology & Behavior, 118, 240–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2013.05.023
    • Buxton, R. T., Pearson, A. L., Allou, C., Fristrup, K., & Wittemyer, G. (2021). A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(14), e2013097118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013097118
    • Hammoud, R., Tognin, S., Burgess, L., Bergou, N., Smythe, M., Gibbons, J., Davidson, N., Afifi, A., Bakolis, I., & Mechelli, A. (2022). Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment reveals mental health benefits of birdlife. Scientific Reports, 12, 17589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20207-6
    • Hedblom, M., Gunnarsson, B., Schaefer, M., Knez, I., Thorsson, P., & Lundström, J. N. (2019). Sounds of nature in the city: No evidence of bird song improving stress recovery. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(8), 1390. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16081390
    • Methorst, J., Rehdanz, K., Mueller, T., Hansjürgens, B., Bonn, A., & Böhning-Gaese, K. (2021). The importance of species diversity for human well-being in Europe. Ecological Economics, 181, 106917. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106917
    • National Geographic. (2025, May 14). Listening to birds sing really does soothe your brain. Here’s how. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/health/article/birds-sing-brain-mental-health
    • Praslova, L. N. (2024). The canary code: A guide to neurodiversity, dignity, and intersectional belonging at work (1st ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/-/9781523005864/
    • Ratcliffe, E. (2021). Sound and soundscape in restorative natural environments: A narrative literature review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 570563. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570563
    • Stobbe, E., Sundermann, J. M., Ascone, L., & Kühn, S. (2022). Birdsongs alleviate anxiety and paranoia in healthy participants. Scientific Reports, 12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20841-0
    • Zhao, W., Li, H., Zhu, X., & Ge, T. (2020). Effect of birdsong soundscape on perceived restorativeness in an urban park. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(16), 5659. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17165659

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