Welcome to Birch Hollow and Thoughts from the Field. The intent of this blog is to share thoughts and solutions on issues and concerns about education, leadership, change, organizational culture, teaching and learning, program design and development, along with anything else that comes to mind that might make your challenges easier to solve.
So here are a few initial thoughts:
- As educators and leaders (or both) there is only one thing that matters – people. Everything we do is to give the people in our organizations and institutions the best possible chance for success.
- Leadership is about people, Management is about things and Administration is about policies, processes and procedures. As leaders we do a lot of all three but must always remember that people are our focus.
- Educators have one purpose – student success. As a teacher you provide the best possible learning environment for your students. As an academic chair or department head you provide the support and resources your faculty needs to provide those learning environments. As a dean you provide your academic chairs and faculty the support, resources professional development and programming that they need to provide the best opportunities for student success. If you are in Student Services, you support student success by providing the supports and services they need to be successful. As a vice-president you provide the strategic support to give those working under you and the students they impact daily the best opportunity for success. As a College president you are the strategic leaders and the external face of the institution that ensures that external agencies and stakeholders provide the support and resources necessary for student success.
- Organizational culture is both overt and covert. It is that covert culture and its many hidden subcultures that are the most important to understand as a leader and change agent. I like Schein’s (2017, pp. 25-27) Lily Pad model as it reminds me that much of an organization’s culture is below the surface and needs to be discovered and understood for any change to be effective.
- I am a supporter of being positive in everything we do. Because of that I feel that Appreciative Inquiry (AI) (Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros 2008) is an invaluable approach for leaders and those engaged in organizational culture and change. Celebrating what is done well rather than focussing on what is wrong is a much stronger perspective when dealing with change. If your child comes home with four As and one C, focus on what allowed them to get those As and apply it to changing the C rather than focussing on the C and trying to fix what’s wrong.
- Change is a constant in any organization and to ensure successful change, there are four things that you need to take into consideration that I call the 4Cs of change – Context, culture, clarity and communication. (More on the 4Cs in a future post).
- The best thing that a teacher can do to support and develop their students is to not provide content in their courses – step away from the content and concentrate on the outcomes and the environment you need to accomplish them. Let your students find and share the content – they will learn it more completely and develop skills that will help them when they go out to industry. When I had this epiphany, I became a much better teacher.
- Be delivery agnostic in the design and development of your programs and courses, don’t focus on the teaching method or delivery modality when creating programs and curses. These days there are so many ways to deliver courses effectively and by not focussing on the delivery method when in design and development you will be able to focus on complete programs and courses that can be delivered in a multitude of ways.
A few initial thoughts to get started. As this blog develops, I’ll be spending more time with these thoughts and a lot more. I am looking forward to sharing with you.
~ Dr. Ian
References:
Cooperrider, D., Whitney, D., & Stavros, J. M. (2008). Appreciative inquiry handbook: For leaders of change. Brunswick, OH: Crown Custom.
Schein, E. H. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.