Day 63 - Considering next steps

It's always an interesting point in the year, on the brink of a new term, just catching your breath after the admin of the last academic year.
I haven't got a set workload agreed yet, and no priorities officially planned, although I have plenty in my head. A few things could change based on discussions yet to be had, but there seems no reason to hold off thinking about this until this happens because otherwise, there will not be any decisions made.

I plan to go through what I project as my workload for the year, and begin to assign it to my year in quite a specific fashion, to give myself a good idea about what I think is a reasonable division of my time. This is quite exciting for me because, although I will be losing some freedom, it will give me firmer limitations to what I am trying to do, a more realistic idea of how long certain tasks take, and the beginning of a real sense of control over what I do when.

And that can't be bad.

Day 33 - Workload (part 3)

Now we come to the hardest part of the workload, which is also the most controversial.
I think that the allocation of a specific budget of time to a specific research project kind of cuts against the grain, especially in the humanities, and perhaps most so in the creative arts. I've been writing music for almost all my life, but if I was to estimate how long it's going to take me to write this piece I have on my desk right now, I would struggle.

I've been doing some reading about managing the creative arts but haven't come to any conclusions yet. I think that it's worth chipping away at, because it enables us to put our research activities on a more professional basis, and I refuse to entertain the idea that could be a bad thing!

The typical research allocation for an academic at my institution is 130 units per year. That works out as 10% of the workload, and therefore around half a day a week (3 hours 30 minutes), but the actual allocation of this research time is problematic. Line managers don't always allocate this, and it we've been told that it is not a guaranteed allowance. My philosophy is that if we allocate specific projects with specific durations and outputs, rather than just assuming that we have half a day per week to do open ended research, we're more likely to be productive and more likely to get allocated the time.

We get an allocation (negotiated with line manager of course) for roles such as Research Centre Director, and I'm given 130 units for this (so 10% of my time again). I believe this is pretty much normal for my institution.

PhD supervision is allocated as 195 units per student across their entire study time (3 years for full-time students, 5 years for part-time students). This works out as 65 units per year for F/T PhD students, and 39 hours per year for P/T PhD students (around 105 minutes per week for F/T, and around 63 minutes per week for P/T).

On top of this there is funded research as well, and knowledge transfer, and commercial activity.
This is a bit of a hot topic in my institution at the moment, as the difference between these different areas is masked by them being lumped into one category and leads to (quite often) an undignified scuffle over how research budgets are divided. For a time, my institution regarded research as being an area that it didn't want to invest too heavily, focusing instead on industry engagement through KT and on money-making commercial activity.

KT (engagement with industry) is a difficult area for me. My specific research is problematic for any money-making venture, but also I'm not sure how I feel about how the relationship between academia and industry can be negotiated. I've recently been in discussions about establishing a KT partnership with a commercial partnership (a concert hall), but this wouldn't be an area that I'm really engaged with, and I would really only be steering the partnership. I suspect I will have more to say on the subject on the future.

Commercial activity consists, for us, mainly in our summer school activities. We currently run three summer schools, only one of which is run by our institution; the other two are run by other agencies and only use our building. This does mean that we have a steady income every year, and this has been really helpful for our research activities, and much more helpful (financially) than the REG (Research Excellence Grant), which is top-sliced to such an extent that we don't get a large amount of it. After the upcoming REF (Research Excellence Framework) assessment exercise, we will probably have even less (because my institution did not contribute in my field... a story for another day!), so this is a fantastic financial resource.

Sensibly, commercial activity workload allocation is divided into Commercial Support, which I believe would include the administration of these projects (being a Principal Investigator), and Commercial Delivery, which would involve the actual activity itself.
This division into administration and delivery enables (again) line managers to assign appropriate workloads, and should counter the standard approach of assuming that administration time is invisible in projects such as this.

There's a big responsibility on the shoulders of managers to understand and implement these allocations, and the relationship between top-down and bottom-up management of these allocations is a tricky one.
I'll have cause to talk about the difference between top-down and bottom-up management another day, but for the time being, I'll just say that the difference is primarily whether you manage allocations from the perspective of looking at the entire academic team as a potential resource amongst whom you can divide various responsibilities, or looking at individuals and managing them as such. My own perspective is that you have to start off with a top-down approach, but customise it to be bottom-up later in the process. Both perspectives have to be maintained simultaneously, rather like those Magic Eye pictures.

It's not easy, but I think it's worth the effort.

Day 32 - Workload (part 2)

Having started off yesterday talking about teaching workload, I thought that I would finish it today.

The remainder of teaching allocations include things like module leadership, personal development tutorials, and things like programme leadership, and school-wide roles.

Module leadership and personal development tutorials come with a specific allocation – you get 15 units, and 0.1 unit per student on the module for module leadership, and 2 units per student for tutorials.

I try to see all of my tutees twice every term, and I allow half an hour for each meeting, so that works out as fine, and I’m quite happy with how that all matches up.

Module leadership involves weekly tasks like collating registers, monitoring attendance, communicating with teaching teams (where relevant), updating the VLE, and making sure that everything is in place for the next week. I think that 30 minutes a week is probably enough for most modules. There’s quite a lot of admin to put in place to ensure that modules run smoothly during the trimester, and quite a lot afterwards (assessment organisation, mark collation, writing module reports), so that doesn’t leave all that much time… Let’s suggest a class-size of twenty for a hypothetical module. That gives us a total of 17 units. If we spend 0.5 units every week of the teaching term (12 weeks), that leaves us with 11 units. Allocating 1 unit to organising assessment, 2 to collating marks, and 2 for writing the module report leaves us with a total of 6 units for preparation. That’s not bad.

We have a scholarship entitlement, which I suppose charges us to keep up to date with the latest publications in our area. That comes to 65 units for the year. If we treat this as being spread out over our entire working year, that comes to around about one hour and fifteen minutes every week. That’s not a lot, but what would you say if I proposed that you spend one hour a week in the library reading journals? I’m not sure that’s something that many of us really feel that we have enough time to do in the course of our weekly routine, but I think that we really should take this seriously. Work out when the journals you read have a new issue, and plan to spend the time reading it. And if your job involves performance, I think that it’s worth considering concert attendance, if correctly planned, as scholarship. One hour a week during teaching terms comes to around 30 hours for me, so leaves 35 hours during the summer. Not a huge allocation, but one to be sensibly applied.

Much of the rest of the teaching budget appears to be up for negotiation between the line manager and the staff member concerned. There are set allocations for specific roles such as programme leader and director of student experience, but no real transparency with the hoi polloi regarding what those set allocations actually are. The official documentation says that ‘Schools differ in their organisation structures and allowances for roles such as…’ so it’s a shame that the school doesn’t see fit to issue further documentation.

And that’s our teaching allocation covered.

You’ve probably gathered by now that I enjoy this sort of thing, and that I’m planning to apply it to my own weekly workload. This isn’t an approach that will work for everyone, but for me, it’s the beginnings of a manageable implementation of my integrated academic framework.

We’ve been told that the workload allocation model is going to change, and the final tweaks are being made to it, so, to some extent, this is all a waste of time in terms of my actual institutionally supported process, but quite aside of that, this is a useful model for me to look at how I manage my workload on a weekly basis and provides the opportunity in looking at the division into different tasks in some detail.

I’ve also been thinking about the ‘missing’ 205 hours per annum unaccounted for by the WAM, and concluded that we should see them as contingency time. I don’t think that we’re really all that familiar with the idea of contingency in HE. We allocate time and resources like bus timetables are written. You work out how long the process optimally takes, and then fill your schedule to match this. If something goes wrong, we find time from our own schedule to make this up.

What if we were all going to plan our weeks but allow around 1 hour a day for which we have no plan? How much of a luxury would that be?

Day 24 - Ambition

Another busy day, another short post.
Just briefly, I wanted to talk about my ambitions.
Where I want to be.

In one sense, I want to carry on doing what I'm doing - only more so. Writing more music, writing more words about music, and talking to more performers and composers; teaching interesting and engaged students.

In another sense, I want to be higher up the academic food chain. I want to be a head of department one day. I want the administrative responsibility from which I have seen academics flee for my entire university life. In other words, I want to take this idea of the integrated academic with me through the promotion route.
I don't want to just do research, with no teaching or no administrative responsibilities; I want to be able to facilitate decision making, support other staff members, and enable them to work as integrated academics as well.

I want to have a Chair one day, and I really want to be an emeritus professor after I retire. I cannot see myself retiring to sudoku puzzles and orchid breeding. I want to be writing music until I drop. I want to be writing about music until I can't remember the beginning of a sentence that I'm writing. I want to be listening to music until I can't really hear it any more. I want to be teaching for as long as I have something useful to say.

This may well all change if I settle down and have a family, but right now, I want to be doing this for the long term,

This may be a bit of a sad admission in some eyes, and in others, a breaking of the social contract regarding how we talk about our ambitions. Neither of these really bother, or indeed, interest me.

Music has become so much a part of my life, that I cannot really visualise it continuing without it.

Day 23 - Towards a manifesto

Tonight, I just wanted to establish the beginnings of a manifesto - what I think I'm aiming for in my job.
I've hinted at it in previous posts, and it's become a theme of my interactions with colleagues recently.

I want to become an integrated academic.

• This means beginning to smooth over the crises and hiatuses of the academic year and approach something like a consistent even keel;
• This means carrying on research projects throughout the year concurrently with teaching, to the detriment of neither;
• This means establishing the groundwork for a sensible work-life balance;
• This means not being a slave to email;
• This means fire-proofing my life from the disorganisation of others and from a culture of last-minuteness;
• This means being in control of my workload.

At the moment, I have no firm idea of how I am going to accomplish these goals, and many of them are going to be trial and error. It may turn out that it isn't possible, but I won't believe that until I fail.

My biggest concern with the amount of pressure that academics are put under is where this pressure really originates. I know colleagues who have been put under intolerable pressure to fulfill bad interpretations of university policy, or just bad university policy, but for the majority of it, we do it to ourselves. And on a larger scale, as academics, we do it to each other.

I have to believe that we have the power to change this, even if it is in small ways.
And when we do, we will be on the road to professionalising a career that is in danger of becoming industralised.

Day 21 - The past is a terrible place to live

Today, I have been ritualistically murdering my past.
That's a bit melodramatic.
I've been sorting through and disposing of the final batch of stuff from my loft in my last house (with the help of my parents).
Apart from a few files I've brought back to securely shred because they include student names, addresses, and phone numbers, I've got rid of a lot.
I've got rid of my undergraduate notes, and a lot of my teaching material because I have realised that my undergraduate notes are terrible, and I've got a lot better at teaching since I made those notes. There were a few things that I needed from both those collections, but I extracted them a couple of years ago.

The main thing that it made me think was about how we let the past consume us.
We worry about what we were supposed to have done but didn't.
We worry about the battles that we attempted but failed.
We are eaten up by guilt about people that we have let down, and tasks unachieved.
And, when you think about it, it's all totally pointless.

The past cannot be rewritten.

A few weeks ago, I found myself sat on some steps with a student who was talking about his regrets during that year, and I gave him precisely that advice. You can't change what has happened, and you are where you are now because of where you have been. Yes, you can learn from your mistakes, but you have to stop worrying about what you should have done, and start deciding what you're going to do.
Regret and guilt are only positive if they spur you on to do things differently now. You have to be able to shut the door on them and move on.

Having said that, you can't live too much in the future either. You can't be constantly planning for what is around the corner. That's no way to live (and as Charles Bernstein says in the libretto to Ferneyhough's opera Shadowtime, 'Just around the corner / Is the coroner' [If someone wants to check that for accuracy before I get to my copy of the score tomorrow morning, please be my guest!]).

It's good advice for students, and I think that it's good advice for an academic too. I don't believe in struggling through the teaching term so that I can enjoy the work that I do in the summer. I believe that it should be possible to do my teaching, marking, and support in a more efficient manner that allows me to continue working on research throughout the year.

We have to live in the now.
The past is a terrible place to live.
The future hasn't had toilets installed yet.

Day 16 - Loving summer

'So are you on holiday all summer?'
I get asked that when people know that I'm a lecturer.
I explain that although undergraduate teaching stops, there is plenty to be getting on with:

• You have to organise work for the external examiners to scrutinise, and then go through the exam boards;
  There's a review process of what you've just taught to grapple with; 
• There's a load of paperwork to catch up with;
• Do you remember all of those emails that you were going to reply to when you had time? Now is the time;
• Events for next academic year need to be planned;
• You have to plan your teaching for next academic year.

There is an idea that academics have no time for research during the teaching term, and then concentrate on it over the summer. To be honest, although I do have more time over the summer, I don't have enough to comprehensively devote myself to research. If I don't try to continually carry out research during teaching term, keeping up momentum during the summer is not a given.

In my experience, no-one really tells you this, and my first summer as an academic was quite a lonely experience as I attempted to work out what I was supposed to be doing. I haven't always made best use of my summers, but I'm getting there.

I suppose I'd offer a few nuggets of advice to new lecturers about the summer:

• Plan what you want to accomplish, and set yourself targets;
• Don't leave jobs like module reports or resit marking to the last minute. The fact you have more time means that the management of this time is critical;
• Take your holiday, and be prepared to really take your holiday - stop emailing, and don't get sucked into 'just popping into the office' because that will turn into hours;
• Find yourself a mentor who has been teaching for a while and ask them about how they organise their summer.

Actually, I'm a big fan of mentors over all. A good mentor is incredibly valuable.

Lunchtime marked the beginning of my actual holiday for this year, although I am not going to take my own advice. There are a few things that I want to sort out before I can properly shut things down, and there are things I want to accomplish over the holiday that are, strictly speaking, work.
I'll write more about that tomorrow, because it touches on areas that Lauren Redhead asked about the other day, to do with the clash between the 'research imperatives' of the individual, and the research strategy of the subject area/institution.

Day 7: Only a matter of time

I've only been doing this daily blog for six days, and I've already missed a day! It was only a matter of time...
I'll do two posts today, one this morning (entitled Day 7), and another tonight (called, surprisingly enough, Day 8).

This morning, I wanted to talk a little bit about time, and the lack of it.
Yesterday was a rare luxury. Our office windows were removed a day earlier than advertised, so I wasn't able to work there, so I ended up in the library (having been in the canteen (too noisy) and the campus cafe (too cold)) working on conference proposals and scanning through books that might be useful for those conferences, and for future work.

I had lunch with a colleague, and we discussed the future of the programme and possibilities of expanding into new taught Master's areas (subject to a review that is looming ever near like a threatening iceberg), and then I was back in the library. Obviously, I have to make more time for this sort of thing.

With this job, it feels so often that we do not have time. I'm becoming more and more aware that I need to make more time, and to organise my time more intelligently. There are certain jobs that come around every year - module reports, updating module descriptors for quality committees, summary of public engagement activities, budget planning - that I deal with when I'm prompted to deal with them. Why don't I make space and time for them in advance? Well, I'm going to.

Day three: Do as I say, not as I do

In my work as a lecturer, I am always telling students things that I think will improve their working lives: work out the routine that suits you, book practice rooms in advance, work in the library, try to read as much as possible, practice/compose every day, redraft redraft redraft, write ahead of schedule, and try to write a little bit every day.

If only I took my own advice.

For me, this is one of the challenges of life as a lecturer. You have the detachment to see what you, and what your students, need to do to improve your/their academic performance, but you're so busy with everything that you need to fit in, that actually doing it is quite a different matter.

I was exactly the same as an undergraduate, and as a postgraduate. I have always left writing essays, articles, papers until the last minute, and now I leave marking to the last minute as well. I have never 'written a little bit every day' even though I believe 100% in it as a way to improve writing technique. In a way, writing this blog everyday is a way of making sure that I do start following that bit of instruction, even when (like today) I forget and leave it to the last minute before I go to bed.

At the moment (and I think that this has been the case since I started the job), I have worked my own priorities around what I needed to do for the students, and I haven't stopped to reflect (and act upon that reflection) about how to organise myself so that what I do provides a better standard of teaching and support for the students. To adopt such an approach will be healthier for me, and (I believe) make me a better academic - more productive and more flexible.

So why don't I? Why is there this resistance to doing it?

Because it's terrifying.

It's so much easier to know that you can do it, than to jump off the cliff and do it. You might fail. What if this is as good as it gets? Maybe you won't be able to do as good a job if you're not doing it like you've always done it, running around like a headless chicken after deadlines that you've just seen approaching like an oncoming train.

A theme I'll come back to again and again (at least I think I will) throughout this blog is the idea of the integrated academic: where administration, teaching, and research are all part of what you do, and support and reinforce each other rather than competing. It's where I want to be, and it's where I believe I can get to. I'm tired of saying 'do as I say, not as I do'. If my advice is good enough for my students, it's good enough for me.

I'll get back to study skills tomorrow (unless I get sidetracked again). It's time to get a good night's sleep.