There were people from schools of all sorts of different shapes and sizes, from huge schools of 100 plus teachers across several sites in several cities through to medium-sized schools with 20-odd staff and smaller schools with just a few colleagues. We agreed that although the scale may differ, the issues are often the same.
Teacher mentors and managers
It felt like in bigger schools it was easier for some teachers to “fall between the cracks” and harder to keep a handle on everything that goes on despite management layers of possibly an overall academic manager, a director of studies as well as various centre managers. We talked about how mentors could help newer or less experienced teachers and one school had mentors for all teachers without a diploma.
In some schools diploma-qualified teachers (DELTA or DipTESOL) are expected to mentor others. Mentoring can also help teachers prepare for management roles as they begin to understand the problems teachers might have. Teachers who are more ambitious tend to do a diploma course looking for career progression, more money and more responsibility.
Others said that mentoring had been tried in the past but often the mentors found it unmotivating and we agreed that it needs continual work to keep it moving forward well. Mentors also need mentoring! And we talked about a staged process looking at what mentoring is, giving feedback on lesson plans and observations and the role of coaching. All this investment is about training teachers to become managers and appreciating the financial investment from school owners to facilitate the process.
The EAQUALS competencies framework in management was mentioned too as a good way to frame and measure development as we can move from being a training manager looking at what makes a good manager, into management and then on to senior management in bigger schools.
Moving into management – Top Tips
We talked in more depth about the process of becoming a manager in a language school and how to go about it.
We all need to invest in our development and a DipTESOL/DELTA is one way to further qualifications and show our commitment, we also talked about the IH management courses and NILE MA (where you can just take separate modules or do the whole MA). If you’re interested in reading more about the NILE MA programme, Rachel Tsateri has blogged about her experience of it.
We also talked about looking for opportunities and asking the question, “What can I do for the school?” Implicit in this idea is the role of critical thinking and self-reflection, all essential parts of a good manager, we need to show it and do it help move forward in our careers. Another suggestion was to get involved in the life of the school and get noticed that way as well as being prepared to commit to doing a bit more rather than working to rule and expecting promotion.
Transparency in management
We talked about how some changes had been made during the pandemic and that we had all worked hard to try to carefully explain it all to teachers. For some of us it had meant big changes, and some uncomfortable changes. For example, in one school where they had a proud tradition of always offering guaranteed hours and salaries, during the pandemic they had had to shift to hourly pay without being able to guarantee hours to teachers. In another school things had unfortunately become “less official” during the uncertainty of COVID. We are all hoping that we’ll be able to go back to those “good practices” soon. We are fearful that some of the less desirable practices (like zero-hour contracts, pay cuts, etc.) for teachers and staff might remain. Watch this space!
IA-trouble?
We talked briefly about IATEFL and said that we would have liked to have gone this year as transport and time off would have been less of a problem but several of us were put off by the price tag. We wondered how many people attended and whether the association was under some economic pressure, like so many of us with our traditional business models under threat. One member reported that they had been to one IATEFL conference and had found it a bit cliquey and we thought that, although that was a pity, it was probably inevitable to some extent. We hoped it’d all be ok and very much value the work the association does.