When I took my first course with IH OTTI, I didn’t imagine that I would end up pursuing the full diploma in Academic Management. I took the Observation and Feedback course because, despite having ten years experience in the classroom and a reasonable number of hours observing teaching and giving feedback as a DoS/Academic Manager, I had not received formal training in how to do this. Although I had experience and was well-read, I wanted some external input into the process and some validation of, and challenge to, my ideas. And this is precisely what I got. The input material, alongside the forum discussions with other participants, forced me to reevaluate what I thought I knew, defend my perspectives and see my ideas evolve. This is what learning is!
Enrolling on the Performance Management course seemed like a logical next step and one which would dovetail well with the first course I had studied. After all, observation really fits into the broader umbrella which is Performance Management. Whilst I came to the first course with some experience of the topic, Performance Management was wholly new. The course grappled with the questions of what performance, in this context, is and how we manage it.
Together, these two courses fed into the redevelopment of our Performance Management/CPD process, a programme we called ‘Developing Together’ and which won the prize for “People Management and Training” at the FECEI Premios Top IX Edición in February 2023. While clearly a great honour to have this work recognised by our peers at the national level, it was also a personal achievement to have applied new learning from the abstract to our real context.
From there, I decided to keep going and next up was the biggest challenge for me overall: the module on Business Management. This was an area in which I had zero training and minimal knowledge and, whilst I harbour no ambitions to find myself running an organisation and managing budgets in this way, it was a massively useful module in helping me understand the thinking and the logic at the centre of decisions taken in those meetings when I’m not present. The module was designed in such a way as to be both accessible and useful for those of us running academic departments, without prior knowledge of finance and business administration.
My final two modules were Teams and Communication and Managing Change. Both offered useful theoretical reading on these often tricky areas for managers. In the first we considered that although we refer to our teachers as a team, are they technically a team or are they a working group? How do we get the best from these groups and teams and how can we share information with individuals as effectively as possible? One innovation I applied after taking this course was the implementation of a Communications Calendar: the idea of which is that you plan out well in advance what communications you are going to send out to staff, when and via what channel. These prevent you from bombarding staff with information from all directions in one moment, and then going silent on them.
The second grappled with the fact that people don’t like change, but change happens! Most valuably for me, we looked at organisational culture and structure and what drives and blocks change from happening. It was fascinating to be able to think historically about change that I’ve experienced in many different organisations (professional and otherwise) and consider those experiences in light of those factors.
It was gratifying, after five modules which were expertly led by Emma Gowing, Lucie Cotterill and Maureen McGarvery, to be awarded with the diploma.
Chris Richards ELT 