Mel's final words

Leadership is action, not position.

Manager is a person who is capable to pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings.

A competent manager/leader can make other people feel important and appreciated.

Unuhia te rito o te harakeke kei whea te kōmako e ko?
Whakataerangitia – rere ki uta, rere ki tai;
Ui mai koe ki ahau he aha te mea nui o te ao,
Māku e kī atu he tangata, he tangata, he tangata!
Take away the heart of the flax bush
and where will the komako sing?

Proclaim it to the land, proclaim it to the sea,
Ask me what is the greatest thing in the world,
I will reply
It is people, it is people, it is people!

Social Studies in the New Zealand Curriculum, page 6

Thanks Kate for coordinating such a wonderful course - You're awesome!!

Mel

Reflection SEVEN

Reflection Seven – Overall learning from the course
This course was wonderful. I strongly recommend other staff members to take this course. I enjoyed listening to the speakers’ share their knowledge and experience of their management and leadership journeys. It is a journey, we all need to learn and we won’t be able to become an effective manager or leader overnight.
Because the speakers were sharing instead of teaching, their role for me was more like a mentor than a teacher.

What obstacles did I face?
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend all sessions due to other commitments e.g. teaching, meeting with staff and students, caring for sick children, togging away for a conference, etc.

What should be done in the future?
I suggest that it might be an option to take the course online and just have few sessions face-to-face. There is more flexibility with an online course and that way, we wouldn’t feel guilty if we couldn’t turn up to class.
In the future, I will seek more opportunities to take professional development workshops or short courses for management and educational leadership. I always believe that if I want to change people’s attitudes toward teaching and learning, I have to change myself. As I said at the beginning of this reflection – it is a learning journey for the ones who are keen to be a manager or a leader.

The following are my personal points of view of being a manager/leader:
• Be confident and believe in yourself
• Trust your staff, use their talents and skills
• Build and maintain relationships with the people around you e.g. other managers, academic staff, support staff, and stakeholders
• Be good at marketing
• Have vision
• Have the five “S’s” as Peter Quigg said - Sit back, Strategies, Structure, Staff and Systems
• Reflect on own practice
• Be happy to receive feedback, open to ideas
• Seek ongoing professional development
• Relax and seek for help if needed (the manager/leader is still human).

Reflection SIX

Reflection Six - Wimba discussion
The idea of Wimba discussion is wonderful. The group members use this opportunity to discuss the course content and support each other online. I enjoyed the communication tool and it worked well for me.


What obstacles did I face?
Unfortunately there were many obstacles for using the Wimba discussion tool:
1) A lack of time to get together - each group member has a busy working schedule and we had to be very committed to get online together and have a productive discussion.
2) Different levels of computing skills - this challenged me the most. Due to differences, we often had to wait for 1 or 2 group members to get online, and then by the time they were online successfully, it was time to finish. We also spent quite a lot of time at the beginning showing them how to use the headset and open the discussion.
3) A lack of resources - in our school, we don’t have enough headsets, and there weren’t any available when we needed to borrow them. We therefore just typed on the discussion board instead.
I am not complaining about the tool, which was great. Rather, I am just sharing the difficulties I had at times working with other people. It may have just been my personal challenge.

What to do in the future?
I would suggest that we could either choose to have our discussion on the Wimba discussion board or face-to-face discussion. We could meet at lunch time, discuss the course content and catch up for lunch. This is also an opportunity for the group members to support each other. I do understand that we need to follow the trend of ICT technologies as part of our teaching and learning tools, and I like them too. However, we can’t afford to spend so much time struggling with the different levels of computing skills.

Reflection FIVE

Reflection Five – Improvement
In the session on ‘leadership style’ by Dr. Stuart Middleton, I learnt some leadership skills which can be applied to my position, especially when I have to work with 25+ visiting lecturers, different working styles and different attitudes toward teaching and learning.

How do these ideas reflect on my position?
As I mentioned in the first reflection, I made some changes this year in order to make our jobs easier and bring the practicum into the 21st century. Due to the heavy workload, I don’t have much time to chat with the team except when we all come to practicum meetings or degree meetings. I like to communicate with staff through emails, as this way I have evidence and records of important conversations.

What obstacles did I face?
I was very disappointed to hear that some colleagues in the team have commented on me having too few consultations. I try to communicate with the team as much as I can but I still cannot make everyone happy. Some of them simply don’t like change and I feel they will disagree with whatever changes I propose.

One of the members in the management team often encourages me to remember that I am the leader of practicum; the final decisions have to be made by me and the programme leader, because we understand the practicum more than other people. My colleague/friend told me that I care to much about how people look at me, which I shouldn’t do. I was thinking of Dr. Stuart Middleton’s discussion, and that as a leader I need to improve the school in all areas. For my position, I need to improve the practicum and innovate the practicum in all areas.

What to do in the future?
Therefore, my aim should put students first, not gossip. I will try my best to be open to ideas from staff and consult with management and staff. I have set up a special meeting for Monday, the 12th of December and all visiting lecturers are invited. At the meeting I will discuss the changes we have had this year and the direction for 2012, as my focus is looking at improvement in all areas of the practicum.

Reflection FOUR

Reflection Four – Case study: Auckland City Mission
In the last session we had a case study on the Auckland City Mission and the challenges Diane Robertson, an Auckland City Missioner, has had.
We had many productive discussions and people in class shared their opinions on how to overcome the challenges and help the organisation. For me personally, I had my special point of view which was different from everyone in class. I tried to share my thoughts with everyone but I was afraid that people may think my ideas were weird.
If I were Diane Robertson, I would close down the organisation. It does not mean that I would give up. I would prefer to start all over again. My proposed strategies are:
1) I may change the name
2) Get into partnership with other non-profit organisations
3) Ask for new funding from the government
4) Recruit people, use their experience and talents
5) Focus on promotion and marketing.
I am not sure if the strategies are workable or not, but as a new organisation, I believe the things they often need are: letting people (communities) know who they are, what they are doing, and why people need to support them.

How do these reflect on my position?
Part of my job is letting early childhood teachers, associate teachers, managers and communities know how good MIT’s B.Ed. programme is. I don’t have any marketing or business qualifications or experience, but I learned from practices and mistakes. We have been trying very hard to build our name in the communities. Many teachers know MIT offers a good teacher education programme. As I mentioned in another reflection, there is a lot of competition out there as other teacher education providers also promote their programmes. We therefore need to build a good reputation, not only in the East and South of Auckland, but also in Central Auckland and the North Shore.
I am not too worried about marketing in East and South Auckland, but we are still new in Central Auckland and the North Shore. The early childhood centres and kindergartens out there have already got a good relationship with the education providers, e.g. the University of Auckland, AUT, Unitec, Open Polytechnic and New Zealand Tertiary College.

What to do in the future?
I have arranged with the management team and the Auckland Kindergarten Association that in term one next year, we are going to have an afternoon tea at Epsom Kindergarten. All the Head teachers from the AKA kindergartens will be invited. Also I will try to run an associate teacher in the city next year. As a minimum, my aim is to let the early childhood centres and kindergartens out there know who we are and what kind of programme we are offering.

Reflection THREE

Reflection Three – Relationship and marketing
In the last reflection I mentioned that I need to build and maintain relationships with the associate teachers. In July this year, the practicum administrator and I went to the University of Canterbury and met with our former external monitor. We learnt so much about how they run the practicum successfully for both on-campus and distance learning programmes.

How do these ideas reflect on my position?
After the Christchurch trip, I decided to have a seminar with the associate teachers who had MIT students this year. I wanted to use this opportunity to thank the associate teachers for their hard work, and for networking. To make it work, I had several meetings with the management team, the Faculty’s business manager, and many discussions with the practicum administrator. I had to plan the whole process very carefully as I had to try to minimise the expenses. I didn’t expect we would have a big number of enrolments, and finally we had approximately 140 associate teachers attend the seminar. The night went really well.

What obstacles did I face?
I didn’t have any obstacles in the planning and marketing processes. It went smoothly and I was so grateful to have such a wonderful management team to support the event. For me personally, the biggest obstacle was getting support from staff. I requested staff to help as we had a big group of people. However, there was only one teaching staff helping and few teaching staff came to support the seminar. I also heard some nasty gossip about me after the seminar.

What to do in the future?
Next year I will do the same seminar again, as the management team and practicum team believe that it is a very good opportunity to show how good MIT’s B.Ed. programme is, as well as to acknowledge the associate teachers’ hard work with our students.

Reflection TWO

Reflection Two – Relationship with associate teachers
When I was reading the PowerPoint slides for each of the sessions, I found that the speakers of several sessions shared about their experience and knowledge of building relationships. The term ‘relationship’ made me think about how the relationship influences the practicum.

How these ideas reflect on my position?
The first group of people I thought of were the associate teachers. The practicum won’t be successful and students won’t be able to complete their degrees without having guidance and support from the associate teachers. As the practicum coordinator, I need to build and always maintain a positive relationship with associate teachers.

What obstacles did I face?
There are some obstacles in terms of building and maintaining a positive relationship with associate teachers, mainly that:
1) There are many early childhood teacher education providers in Auckland, so the associate teachers don’t need to worry that they won’t have students; some early childhood centres have 3 or 4 student teachers on practicum at the same time. Therefore, a competitive atmosphere is created among all providers in Auckland. Some associate teachers like to choose to receive students from either the universities or polytechnics, while private providers are often finding it hard to get placements for students.
2) Some students cannot do their practicum properly. There are lots of reasons behind this such as personality clashes, students who cannot meet the practicum criteria, and students’ attitudes problems or cultural differences.

What to do in the future?
I will think of a variety of strategies to build and maintain a positive relationship with associate teachers. Earlier this year I created a web site for associate teachers, where they can get in touch with us and get all the information for practicum at anytime. I will continually keep the information updated on the web site and will also run the associate teacher meeting in each semester. I will have a networking meeting once a semester, support the associate teacher symposium with other education providers, and have an associate teacher seminar every year (which I will discuss in the next reflection).