Teaching development roles
TAKING ON A NEW ROLE
At some point you are likely to take on a specific role that actually allows you scope to develop teaching, even if the role is not one that you initially wanted; alternatively, you may have begun to carve out a role of your own making. The early period of your appointment gener-ally sets the tone for ongoing work. If you are simply learning to manage one crisis after the next, then you will be unlikely to introduce many new developments. Or if you find that you hardly have any time to do more than keep the role ticking over, then again this will set the scene for your later work. Induction into the role is thus critical. Even if you do not have a formal mentor, you have a natural excuse to talk to others in similar roles, either in your own institution or beyond, about the opportunities and pitfalls of the role. For instance, an idea on how to protect or save your time could pay real dividends.
A responsibility for teaching can, however, easily become a mainte-nance function rather than an occasion for leadership. The difference resides in the way that you carry out a role rather than the role itself.
Even what you might think of as mundane roles can allow scope for 1111
development opportunities. A number of positions come up regularly within departments, including those of quality assurance officer and disability support officer, but do not accept these roles just for the sake of doing something. Pay lip service to a responsibility and it may become a tiresome chore. Actively engage with it as a positive learning oppor-tunity and it will become a valuable aspect of your practice.
It will therefore be worth looking more broadly at advice on exer-cising leadership in higher education, enabling you to motivate colleagues and make things happen. Ramsden (1998) argues that it is essential to be clear about what you want to achieve. Vision and good ideas are essential, enabling you to convince others to invest their energy in the direction that you have set. Without this vision, ongoing problems can only too easily sap your energy. This vision can be complemented by a belief in your own ability to make things happen, whatever the obstacles – a factor that is critical to developing teaching more widely as we have already seen in Chapters 3 and 8.
Ramsden points out that the environment in which teaching is carried out is also critical – your colleagues need to feel that they are trusted, that their contributions are valued and that their aspirations can be met, so you also need to understand your colleagues’ perceptions of a situ-ation. As he notes (1998: 83): ‘The credibility of the vision stems from the fact that it is in harmony with the aspirations of academic staff, which in turn arises from them being academics themselves.’ You might pick out a tool from Chapter 4, or another chapter, and use it to review and evaluate the way in which you lead colleagues through your teaching development role, helping to ensure insight into your colleagues’ atti-tudes and aspirations. It may also help to engage in a strategic planning process, modelled on Ramsden (1998: 235), as shown in Box 9.1.
Both Ramsden (1998) and Knight and Trowler (2001) point out that it is essential to learn to lead. Awareness of your own approach to leadership is not something that can be developed overnight. It will similarly take time to learn how to draw out your colleagues, so that they are willing to volunteer their perspectives and views. And beyond this, you will also need knowledge of educational practice, approaches to leadership, and your own context, as well as the experience needed to pull all of this together – as Turner and Bolman’s research (1998, cited in Knight and Trowler, 2001: 167) proposes.
You need to create space in which to develop this vision and enable this learning. So even at the outset, you may have scope to negotiate what tasks you will actually take on as part of your role. It may be
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possible to pass on some of the more routine functions to a more junior colleague. Early on, you might also introduce initiatives that mean you need to spend less time maintaining systems. Time spent on processes rather than content can be particularly beneficial, as even introducing a simple pro forma or standard letter can streamline a process, or allow it to be passed on to someone else. You may then need only to review the process rather than carry it out each time.
This brings us to time management – creating space to allow you to shape the role in light of your priorities, rather than simply reacting passively to the day-to-day demands of your role. You may find it helpful to adopt a range of time management exercises, developing your ability 1111
■ What are the institutional or national trends that underpin change related to your role?
■ Spell out the characteristics of the environment in which your role is situated. What interests and motivates your colleagues?
■ How do you prefer to exercise leadership? Characterise several situations in which your leadership has been welcomed.
Outcome analysis
■ What student learning needs are in most urgent need of attention?
■ What do you want to achieve in this role? For yourself, for specific colleagues and for your team as a whole?
■ What would colleagues and managers want you to achieve in this role?
Leadership agenda
■ What is the gap between your current situation and the desired outcome?
■ Set out your leadership agenda in light of the gap between these, detailing your priorities, strategies, dangers to avoid, and development needs.
to manage your workload. Perhaps the first most important aspect of time management is actually to be aware of how you spend your time, as Julie Wray found in Case study 9.3: does it reflect your priorities?
You will also find that if you continually move from one task to another, perhaps by accessing emails, taking phone calls or browsing the internet too frequently, then you will benefit from planning what you carry out when, and then protecting your plans. This can allow you to plan in key activities that otherwise might never happen, such as reading articles or other material that is related to the development side of your role, and to deliver on your priorities. The project management techniques that we discussed in Chapter 8 will also be worth adopting more widely in your work. Most staff in higher education fulfil a number of roles, making it important to manage your workload as a whole, an issue that the final case study explores.
Review point 9.3 TIME MANAGEMENT
Complete a log of how you spend your time for a week, indicating each task that you complete, when it starts and finishes, whether you planned to carry it out, and any particular notes (see the log made available within Chapman, 2002).
Case study 9.3
BALANCING MY WORKLOAD
When I first came into higher education four years ago I was confident that I would be able to balance my teaching with everything else entailed in a lecturing role. My development would just happen, as I was both crafted at reflexivity and experienced in research. Having come direct from health care practice I felt capable of meeting the challenges, organising my workload and being assertive about saying no.
Well, maybe it was no surprise that this did not happen. Within a year the demands of the job had overwhelmed me, and I was bogged down in what seemed like boring, cluttered and uncreative work. I was constantly problem-solving for students, and burdened by paperwork and the need to TEACHING DEVELOPMENT ROLES
comply with university rules (and there are plenty). There seemed to be little time left even to plan my teaching, let alone read the relevant literature or develop anything. I was leading a Masters programme, and yet had no space to organise and develop the programme. My output of publications was considerably depleted in comparison to when I was in practice; and this certainly felt rather odd. I began to wonder how this had all happened.
It occurred to me after looking at my yearly workload-balance form that most of my time was spent on jobs that were allocated the lowest weighting.
This was largely down to an aspect of my practice that I was not really equipped to deal with: my role as a PBL facilitator. This form of teaching was new to me, and while I had attended some training sessions and read the literature, actual practice of PBL with students proved overpowering. I had become consumed by the students’ inability to work as a team and create a cohesive group dynamic, and had begun to adopt an approach to pastoral care that was far too matriarchal and ‘hands on’.
I began to think about what strategies could be employed to enable the students to engage more appropriately in PBL and at the same time release me from a ‘dependency role’. In talking to some students it struck me that they needed to take ownership, and through this realisation I was able to pull back and hand over PBL to the students. I began, for instance, to timetable my availability and I requested from students a clear purpose for any meet-ings. I had seen my role as a teacher to teach and lost sight of the process of learning and discovery. As well as improving my teaching, this has created more time to dedicate to the Masters programme and to my research.
Julie Wray, School of Nursing, Salford University
CONCLUSION
Teaching certainly offers immense scope for exercising leadership in proposing and implementing new ideas, drawing colleagues into the process and seeing the difference that your work can make for students.
You clearly need to take responsibility for this process, deciding where and how to invest your effort, and where to hold back, perhaps stak-ing your claim to an area through clearly recognised dynamism.
Moreover, the range of possible directions in which you can develop your teaching remains vast. Which ideas should you prioritise? Should you focus on assessment, the accessibility of your internet resources, the extent to which you foster a dialogue with your students? Or perhaps it is more important to introduce some recent research into a stale 1111
course unit. And there is immense choice in the way in which you can take development work forward within a given area. Who should you work with? How should you go about staking a more obvious claim to specific areas of expertise? Should you look for more authority or for additional resources? We undoubtedly need a sense of direction to our work if we are to reconcile all of the conflicting demands and the varied opportunities and if we are to channel our energy rather than allow it to dissipate. It is to these, and related, questions that we now turn in our concluding chapter.
REFERENCES
Boice, R. (1992) The New Faculty Member. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Chapman, A. (2002) Time-log, Online, accessed 10 August 2005, www.
businessballs.com/timemanagement.htm
Cohen, L., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. (2000) Research Methods in Education, fifth edition. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Gustavsen, B. (2001) ‘Theory and Practice: The Mediating Discourse’, in Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds) Handbook of Action Research. London:
Sage, 17–26.
Knight, P. and Trowler, P. (2001) Departmental Leadership in Higher Education.
Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education/Open Univer-sity Press.
Luft, J. (1970) Group Processes: An Introduction to Group Dynamics, second edition.
Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books.
Ramsden, P. (1998) Learning to Lead in Higher Education. London: Routledge.
Seldin, P. (2004) The Teaching Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions. Bolton, MA: Anker.
Turner, C. and Bolman, R. (1998) ‘Analysing the Role of the Subject Head of Department in Secondary Schools in England and Wales’. School Leadership and Management 18, 3, 373–88.
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