Day 77 - I love it when a plan comes together

Today, I gave the inaugural lecture in my research centre's new series of open lectures entitled 'Music in a Globalised World'. Given the modest advertising I put out, I was actually quite pleased with the audience of around 15 who heard me speak and asked questions afterwards.

In the large scheme of things, that's not a huge number, but I'm not going to fixate on that right now. I'm very aware that everything has to start somewhere and we can't always expect the first event in a series to be oversubscribed. A reputation builds, and this is what I'm hoping for my little series.

The lecture was videoed, and, once I've edited it, I'm planning to upload it to iTunes U so that it is available to everyone with internet access. This is my plan for the entire series, should the speakers be happy, as it enables us to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, we are building a genuine research community within the campus that complements the existing research communities, but on the other, we are also dipping a toe in the water of open access online presence.

When I was an undergraduate student, I attended the department's guest lecture series and got quite a lot out of it. When I was a PhD student at the same institution, I was a regular fixture. When I came to my current institution to teach, I did really miss that. I think it's important for academics to continue to engage with what their peers are developing, and that research doesn't just stop with our own interests.

I think it is especially important to provide a platform for academics to hear their colleagues, within the same institution, speak about their research, as it builds awareness and mutual respect, and although I think that we largely share a lot of respect for each others' teaching, respect for research can only generally function on the basis of productivity and visibility rather than on interest and quality.

So today was a tiny step in developing this idea. I'm hoping that the audience will return in October for the next session and that they will grow.

Day 62 - New faces

Today was the first day of the trimester with the new Freshers starting.
So far, so good, and everything seemed to go smoothly.
This is the second year I have planned an extensive programme of events that covers the whole week and a range of topics. The first year I was programme leader, it was mostly crammed into one day and I could see them fading and not taking in information even as I gabbled it at them.

I think that what has been most liberating this year, especially, has been the acceptance that I do not have to do everything myself. I have divided up my plan between all the available staff, and entrusted some sessions that I delivered last year to some of my colleagues - a bit step for a control freak like me - and I know that it will be ok.

Being a member of a team where, even when we have some disagreements about how to do certain think, you can rely on the others to turn up and do the job is not something that you necessarily expect to find in HE nowadays and I am so very grateful that I have that.

Tomorrow, I have an interview elsewhere, and am not going in to my campus except to stop by for lunch afterwards. My colleagues are handling it all. How many other programme leaders can say that with any confidence?

Day 55 - Look back

I started the task of writing my programme leader's report today.
For me, that means reading every module report written by the teaching team and attempting to tease out some narrative threads that link them together.
This is an intensely annoying process because each report is saved as a Microsoft Word document on a shared drive. In order to read them, I have to download them to my computer and open them one by one. Tedious. Unnecessary.

But. I enjoy this task every year. You may ask why I bother, because after all, I'm meeting with the teaching team throughout the year and have a pretty good idea about what worked and what didn't work (and why), but the reports give me another angle - how the lecturer, looking back, perceived things. This often includes elements that they may have not spoken to me about, that they only realised were relevant when writing the report and reflecting.

There's a widespread feeling that the module reports are meaningless and pointless and that no-one ever reads them. I want my teaching team to know that I always do. I think that one of the ideas is that I read them all, and reflect on what this means for the programme, and then put this in my report, which is then read by the department head, who reads all of the programme reports from their department, and reflects on what this means for the department, and then puts this in their report, which is then read by the Head of School, who reads all of the department reports from their School, and reflects on what this means for the School, and so on and so on.
That is the plan anyway.

And I like sharing in the reflection. Seeing what individual lecturers see as the important elements of their modules is a revelation, and enables me to support them better. Perceiving a slight disconnect between the delivery of linked modules in the reports last year, I have worked hard to bring the team closer together and to discuss shared practice. It looks like that may have paid off. Either that or they're humouring me.

I am a firm believer that the strengths of every robust team derive from the membership of the team, not from any leader, and that it is the responsibility of every team leader to bring the best elements out of their team. That is the strength of the leader. I think that it is a really challenging role, but it is one that I enjoy.

Day 52 - My Day At The Zoo

It was our away day this year, and for the first year in a few, we did actually leave the University. We went to the zoo.
In previous years, I've felt that our away days have been little more than an opportunity for us to argue hypotheticals and draw up grandiose blueprints that never see the light of day, but this year it felt like we kept the focus small and addressed some key points which resulted in action points.

I think that this is the key to sessions like this. You can be over ambitious and attempt to put the world to rights, but you will end up with a wish lists so long that nothing from it will ever come into being. Distinct problems with distinct solutions are always preferable. At least to me.

I've also been really pleased that the action points that we've determined have 'reporting dates' within the cycle of meetings that I've organised for the coming trimester. This way, the action is not just focused but also we are given a deadline for at least some movement. I suppose so many meetings in HE are divided between simply reporting what is happening (or what hasn't happened!) and blue sky improvisation, and it was really refreshing to come out feeling that I knew what I was going to go away and do.

Plus I saw some very cute monkeys.

Day 47 - Setting standards

A few years ago, my counsellor gave me some excellent advice.
She told me that I absolutely could not expect other people to live up to my standards.
To do so would make me ill, destroy working relationships and friendships, and generally make any interaction with other human beings untenable.
It was difficult advice to take, but as each year goes past, I see more wisdom in it.

It applies to my relationship with students, as well as with colleagues, and with management.
Most of all, it means I get less stressed at work.
I get angry and frustrated less frequently.

Just because my colleague is not doing a task the way that I would do it, does not make it wrong.
Just because my colleague has elected to perform a task in a less efficient way than the way that I have already demonstrated to them does not make it wrong.
Just because my colleague has elected to perform a task in a way that I regard as being unhelpful does not make it wrong.

I cannot do everything, and I cannot know everything. I cannot oversee everything.
I cannot judge everyone. This is not my place.
I struggle with this on a daily basis, and I guess that other people around me may do as well.
They may want to constantly tell me how to do what I'm doing.
They may want to constantly remind me of things that they feel that I am forgetting, or correct my priorities.

Knowing the right juncture to intervene in someone else's practice in a constructive way is an art form, and not one that just comes to you. I have enough problems judging it with myself, but in that process of developing self-knowledge, it is also helping me read other people and attempting to make that judgement with them.

Day 36 - No agenda

There are days when I have a very clear idea about which I want to write.
Today is not one of those days.

This leads me on to an (at least for me) interesting question:
How do we deal with meetings without agendas?

I think that these come in two different flavours:

1. The meetings where an agenda is present, but the chair just hasn't revealed it to the meeting
2. The meetings that are literally there for the sake of having a meeting

Flavour 1 can be countered through administrative assistance and is not really as worrying as flavour 2. When I am chairing a regular meeting, I try to ensure that there is something useful to discuss in every meeting. It might not be urgent, or even necessary, but it should be useful and require discussion, not merely reporting. I think that there is a space for reporting, but staff meetings should not turn into a school assembly.

Every agenda point should result (or have the potential to result) in an action point.
Every staff meeting should be minuted and the minutes distributed.
Action points should be chased up.

I'd like to think that all of this would go without saying, otherwise why are we doing it?
It's not just to see each other and spend time in each others' company. There are too many other things to be doing. And I'm not suggesting that the bureaucratic side of all of this is the most important thing. I've spent far too long in meetings in another institution where so much time was spent revisiting the minutes of the previous meeting that we didn't reach the agenda of the current meeting.

So how do we deal with meetings without agenda?
I've read suggestions that you simply refuse to go.
I don't know how my manager would respond to that, and it's almost guaranteed that the meeting you refuse to attend will be the important one.
It would just be nice to attend more staff meetings which didn't result in me writing 'why am I here?'.

Day 23 - Predictable incident of the dog in the night-time

Following on from yesterday's post, I wanted to focus a bit on what my workload actually entails in real terms.
But I ran out of time to actually prepare this properly.

But as I started to type this, fireworks went off outside and woke the dogs up, and one of them started whining because she prefers to sleep on my bed rather than her own.
Why mention this at all?

I suppose it's a more general reflection rather than a specifically higher-education related one, but we find ourselves continually at the mercy of other people's timetables and schedules. These other people may not be able to access our schedules, or may not care about our schedules. This will never change.

You will be called into a meeting next week, only to have it cancelled the day before.
Important matters will be discussed without an agenda being issued to give you a heads up.
Your carefully managed schedule with adequate time for every task will be disrupted because someone else forgot to plan anything a day in advance, let alone as far ahead as you do.

A student will get seriously ill, or will suffer a bereavement that means you want to give them an extension that will mess up your plans (or perhaps even your holiday).
A student will not take advantage of any of the support opportunities provided during the term, but call on you at the last minute.
A student will just drop off the map, stop communicating, and basically freak out.

And, yes, a firework will wake your dog up when you really want to sleep the whole night without them pushing you to the side of the bed.

What can we do about this?
Really, nothing.
It will always happen.

So what?
I suppose it's important to factor in workload contingencies.
Some breathing space in the week which can be rescheduled.
I've never actually tried this, but I think it's worth thinking about.

In response to the other observation, about dealing with last minute cancellations,my strategy is to get into the position where you are the one arranging the meeting, assisting the drawing up of the agenda, and working out who is going to be there. Does it work? Let's see.

Day 19 - Pick your battles

A useful life lesson, is that you should always pick your battles.
Pick the battles that you stand a chance of winning.
Save your energy for those.

You could apply this lesson to teaching, and to how you expend energy on the students that you can 'turn around' (if it's possible to detect such potential). Perhaps that's the wrong way of looking at it. It's a matter of creating situations where those students who can see the point, will be given the tools to improve themselves, and of creating the tools by which they can do this.

For me, one of the hardest lessons to learn, has been how to work alongside colleagues and learning how to pick my battles. As the son of a teacher, I've been intensely aware of the humanity and human failings of educators for my whole life, but I wasn't prepared for colleagues to have such different (and entrenched) ideas about how to educate, how to research, priorities within HE, how to conduct meetings, what team work actually means, etc. I have left meetings where I've felt like bursting into tears, had shouting matches with colleagues, been icy and short, and (on one memorable occasion) had a former line manager threaten to send an entire confidential email chain on to a colleague that it concerned, so that they could submit a complaint to HR using the emails as evidence...

I've found the personal (and where the personal becomes the professional) interactions of collegial life to be one of the biggest challenges of the job in many ways. A counsellor I was seeing to help with depression, a few years ago, told me that I couldn't set the terms by which my colleagues lived their lives or taught, and that I couldn't expect them to live according to my standards. This was a hard lesson to learn. I had to accept that my standards weren't necessarily universal and correct. I still have a bit of an issue with that and, to be perfectly honest, I'd have to say that even now I only accept that other people have to be allowed to be wrong, but that's the stubborn emotional side of me; the intellectual side of me understands (at least I think so) and analyses the scenario more objectively.

I have learned that there are battles that can be won, and battles that are never ever going to be won, at least in the current circumstances. There is no point in tilting at the same windmills over and over again, and then being surprised when the result is the same. That raises stress levels, and only ingrains the problem with both parties. With every person you have to deal with, and with every category of topic that must be discussed, there will be the right time and the right environment to raise the subject, if it is a subject about which a meaningful discussion can be had. It is part of your job as a successful colleague and team player to learn to appreciate and anticipate this.

At the end of the day, you will have colleagues that rub you up the wrong way, but remember that you are rubbing them up the wrong way as well. Learn to pick your battles - the ones that are worth winning, and the ones that can be won - as well as learning to pick the battlefield and your allies for that battle.