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 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.

Day 14 - We are not the Daleks

Universities are, we are told, a business.
As a business, we have customers and competitors.
Our aim is to crush our competition and make our customers very very happy.
I will rant on about the problems with this model another day, but I want, very briefly, to talk about competition today.

Who are our competitors?
We usually look to geographically close institutions against which to measure ourselves.
After the recent University guide 2014 subject tables were published by the Guardian, my institution proudly claimed that it had come top for Music (among a handful of other arts subjects) among all Scottish modern universities. Never mind that we came 41st out of 77 in the UK, or that the only other Scottish modern university in the table for Music is the University of the West of Scotland...
League tables are rubbish, and I think we all know that they're rubbish, but the sector still seems to be setting their clocks by them for the moment.
But I digress. As usual.

Do we want to do better than our competitors, beat them at their own game, or do we want to aim to address other areas of the 'market' and attract consumers that might be looking for something else?
In other words, rather than looking at the sector as a race, or as a battle between (for example) grocers, we should look at the whole high street. Yes, there is an Italian restaurant, but that doesn't mean that there can't be a Korean takeaway. If we begin to look at the sector this way, it isn't so much to do with competition as complementation; working in harmony to provide a varied education sector.
That's an idealist's view, perhaps.
I am a bit more pessimistic about the direction that most universities will continue to take, and I suspect that we will continue to be encouraged to destroy the opposition with our mighty brains and superior teaching powers.

But is that where our competitiveness stops?
In my institution, we have three Faculties, which are further subdivided into Schools, which are further subdivided into Subject Groups (departments to most of us).
There is an undercurrent of competition between Subject Groups, between Schools, and between Faculties. You can probably imagine how this happens, when different areas are invited to 'bid' for money, resources, and space, and I suspect it's the same everywhere.

We talk about healthy competition and unhealthy competition.
Unhealthy interinstitutional competition leads us to conflict and unproductive posturing (among other things). Staff and students suffer the consequences. In a rush for Mother's love, we aim to kill the other chicks in the nest and become the solitary bloated ugly cuckoo in the nest.
Not an attractive prospect.

Don't become too insular. Don't believe the propaganda that you may be fed.
Reach out of your department to other departments.
Today, I met with the programme leader for Psychology about my Music Psychology module. Not just another Subject Group, or another School, but a totally different Faculty... In short, I'm worried that the number of honours year modules we are currently teaching may be cut due to financial considerations, and I'm looking to address this preemptively (before a review). We had a great chat, and we will be (hopefully) trialling a few Psychology students on my module, and (in the future) bringing in some of their expertise into the module as well.
This is precisely the kind of model we should be pursuing. When a module can take on extra students, why do we put up barriers? This module does not require great musical aptitude, just musical engagement and intellectual curiosity. We can tear down the barriers.

In short, a tree that has a wider root system is harder to fell.
We shouldn't turn inwards to ideas of subject purity like the Daleks, hating all others who are not like us, instead we should be making connections and looking for allies.
The darkness is always coming, and there may come a time when you need to warm yourself by another fire.