Management skills, professors need them too

An underlying current in my blog post series on how I manage the teaching staff for my 200+ student CS1 class is that teaching large classes requires management skills. Notice I said skills because I fully believe we can all learn and improve how we manage people. The amount of effort required to learn a particular skill will, of course, vary. But that just means some of these may take work and require conscious effort to learn. Moreover, not all management techniques will work for you and the people you manage.


[Also posted on medium.]


I will say up front that I have no secret techniques for any of this. Most readers of this blog are also teachers, so you know there are few shortcuts to learning something. And these kinds of professional skills are rarely taught in academic settings, especially in preparation for becoming a professor.


So instead, this blog post will focus on first my processes to learn new management ideas, skills, frameworks, and techniques. Then I'll go over some practices I currently use. And I'll close with some things that I am trying.

How I learn new ideas

I love podcasts. So my primary way to learn new information is through podcasts. I subscribe to a few that span the spectrum of organizational psychology and general "help me with a life problem" (an unsurprising number of these are workplace problems). Here are some, in no particular order:


If you have no interest in podcasts nor plan to integrate them into your life, I recommend finding other information sources. What's essential is integrating learning new management ideas into your everyday information consumption habits. So if you like reading, sign up for some newsletters or find some blogs. Like to watch videos? Find some video creators that talk about this stuff. When it's part of your regular consumption habits, you will consistently engage with these ideas. While many ideas will only be somewhat helpful, thinking about your processes often leads to ideas that could work for you.

Some of my practices

Here's a list of some of my quick-to-explain practices:

  • Once-a-week check-ins with a random set of TAs - I have an entire blog post on this. I check in with every TA twice a semester. It helps me think of each of them as an individual and see if there is anything I can do for them.

  • Once-a-week reflection across all TAs - As part of my weekly check-in, I also note anything that sticks in my mind about individual TAs. This practice again helps me see my TAs as individuals and is a valuable reference for recommendation letters or deciding whether to rehire someone.

  • TA win, or I'd like feedback - This deserves its own blog post at some point. A quick explanation: every once in a while, I have TAs share a "TA win" or "I'd like feedback." I usually choose the TA at random with some round-robin for fairness. They talk about something that has gone well for them as a TA or something they'd like feedback on. Often it's a request for feedback, and after they share, I usually respond with some advice. Or it's a moment for me to learn what is not working in the class, and we discuss how we could change something to improve things.

  • Mid-semester survey collects information about TAs - I run mid-semester surveys, and they include questions about the TAs. The questions ask if they had something positive about up to 3 TAs and something negative about up to 3. In addition, if there are dedicated recitations/discussions, the Qualtrics survey has special logic to ask each student about their specific TAs. 


A more involved practice is ensuring my head teaching staff are also good managers. Which means I have/am training middle managers. I've only recently had the capacity to start thinking about how to help my head staff become better managers (it's one reason for this blog post). Some current thoughts are:

  • Necessary management skills vary by head staff role. The head grader needs to be good at assessing workload, assigning work, and getting graders to finish their work on time. The head office hours TA needs to be good at assigning schedules, handling last-minute shift changes, and ensuring some quality in how TAs are helping students.

  • If you struggle with some management skills, you can hire head teaching staff to compensate for that. The key is knowing what management skills you are weak at and identifying that skill in someone else.

  • Moreover, after hiring competent managers, it is crucial to be transparent about how they can "manage up," a.k.a. how they can manage you to ensure you do what they need you to do. And there are system structures for such things. My teams know if they assign me a card in the Trello board, I'll get it done. Another professor I know purposely meets with different members of their head staff on different days of the week, and the head staff know to pass the professor's task list down to the next person meeting with them and continually remind the professor of the tasks.

  • Manage head staff knowledge transfer. This requirement means knowing when someone is stepping down early enough to find a replacement and train them. Most training processes I know of use the apprenticeship model, where the replacement shadows and starts doing the current person's job the semester/quarter the current person is stepping down. This apprenticeship starts at the latest mid-term. Another process I've heard is there is always a senior and junior person with the same title, and the transition happens whenever the senior person steps down (usually after two terms).

Practices I'm experimenting with

Here are some things I'm starting to practice, and if anyone is interested, I can write a reflection blog post about them.

  • I purposely give TAs praise or feedback when I learn of good or bad things. The praise part I especially need to do since my systems much more easily notify me of bad things.

  • Think more carefully about communication mediums. Slack is convenient and async. However, text is not a very rich communication medium (tone, body language, etc., is lost). A TA could read my message imagining the worst tone and get the wrong idea. Face-to-face interaction is much richer but also less convenient. Moreover, it requires the other person to think fast and on their feet when they may not appreciate being put on the spot. This situation is especially true if you are in the step-up position of power.

  • Power dynamics are important to consider. The course instructor is the most powerful position in the course, and it takes time to build trust and safety in a group such that the teaching staff feels empowered to speak up to you. Some will never feel empowered. And I want to be more explicit about this and encourage my head staff (who hopefully do feel safe to do so because they have worked with me long enough) to model in front of the newer TAs that they can push back on me and speak up. I also want to give them opportunities to talk to me privately.

  • Power dynamics are a lens I want to use more when considering my communication mediums, especially when I have to give feedback. Rather than just saying what needs fixing, I add in other text about how I believe in them and their abilities, and the feedback is to help them grow, not to make them feel incompetent.

Conclusion

I firmly believe that being a good manager helps you be a better teacher because it helps you spread the workload beyond yourself and evenly among your teaching staff. However, developing these skills and even the capacity to start paying attention to such things takes time. So don't feel bad for not doing it well yet.


I hope this blog post was helpful to someone, and if there was something I mentioned that you think deserves more explanation, please let me know!

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