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Management is getting things done through others
My father had a favorite phrase he learned in business school* that was often repeated throughout my childhood, usually in response to protestions from my siblings and I that we had to do the chores** he assigned to us, yet he would still get credit for doing the job, since “Management is getting things done through others.” As we got older, the phrase became something of a family joke to highlight when one of us was trying to get someone else to do their work for them, as in
Mom: Did you get your sister to carry up your clean clothes?
Me: Management is getting things done through others.
With this view of management as largely parasitic, it is perhaps unsurprising that I was drawn more to solitary pursuits in school and my career- I eschewed group projects, preferred to be the one doing the work, and didn’t need anyone to take the credit simply for managing me, thank you very much. Coupled with a pathological inability to do things until the absolute last minute, it has always seemd to work better to do as much as possible by myself, whether in my research, open education work, or even in my hobbies.
A few years ago, I heard Rajiv Jhangiani quote an African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Individuals can sprint ahead in the short term, but a group can benefit from the different strengths of each member, thus continuing far beyond where the sprinter runs out of steam.
Struggling to apply this proverb to my own work, I realized that my father’s managerial style might not have been about burden-shifting: for every task we were assigned, he prepared the tools, showed us how to use them, and checked in as we worked. Through his project management, we gained skills and experience and accomplished more in less time by working together. Instead of being a parasite, good management is a benefit to a project.***
As I have become more solidly mid-career, it has become apparent that the do-it-myself approach has hard limits in the scale and scope of what I can achieve. If I want to do bigger things, then I need more collaborators, whether I’m the one managing or the one being managed. Managing a student research lab this past spring was extremely challenging- instead of doing research, I was tracking down timesheets and writing status reports- much more managing than doing. Yet the research our lab was doing was significant, all the more so because undergraduate students were doing it on their own. They were able to do the research because I did the managing.
Unfortunately, good management requires things I really struggle with- mainly, prompt communication, adhering to due dates and schedules, and reducing procrastination. Having seen the benefits of expanded teams in a variety of settings, I’m pushing myself very far out of my solitary comfort zone this year- I’ve taken on a role as a co-facilitator for a seminar, a CRSP student researcher, and a brand-new Open Education Student Fellow. I’m reading up on best practices and hacks for managing email, procrastination, and team workflow- if you’ve got suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
* Dad received his BBA and MBA from Baruch College, when it was still locally known as Downtown City College. .
** despite a complete lack of training and experience, my father was an avid do-it-yourselfer, which meant that the assigned chores ranged from standard yard work to house painting, pouring concrete footings, cutting tiles, and other fairly substantial home improvement projects. And this, all before one could google how to do things!
*** though I’m decades past my teen years, it still stings a bit to admit my dad might have been right about something.
We Heat Our Classrooms
So, this summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about my course policies and my increasingly open pedagogy. I’m especially thinking about due dates (or their more ominous title “deadlines”) and flexibility. I wrote about how flexible deadlines helped students learn in my Spring 2020 classes here and I really don’t think I’ll ever go back to being the deadline hardass I was when I started teaching 15 years ago, when I really believed that strict course attendance and due date rules administered ruthlessly to all students regardless of anything else was the right way to run a class. I cringe when I think back on that, and to all of my former students, I’m really sorry. I’ve learned and grown, I promise.
There is, however, a strong pushback whenever I bring up flexible due dates, which I’ve done a lot this summer- I’ve discussed this with the excellent folks at APSA’s Online Teaching Workshop (sidebar for political scientists- go check out APSA Educate– the workshop contributed lots of resources, and there are many others that might be helpful), with colleagues in the KCC Open Pedagogy Fellowship, with other colleagues during other meetings, with folks on Twitter, basically with anyone I have talked to in the last 3 months. Many instructors who I really respect fall into the hard-liners category, often for the same reason- they say they enforce due dates because that’s what “the real world” will require, and they want to prepare students for their professional lives after graduation, or for the tougher 4 year colleges they will be transferring to after finishing on our campus.
I have several problems with this. First off, my students live every day in the real world. I don’t need to explain deadlines to them, because they already deal with hard due dates, like having to make rent, or not being able to- a 2010 survey of CUNY students found that 41.7% faced housing instability, and that was before the COVID-19 pandemic which has devastated the lives of so many New Yorkers as well as caused massive unemployment and economic slowdown which is likely to get much worse before it gets any better.
Furthermore, it would be downright hypocritical of me to demand on-time delivery of students work, because I am a habitual deadline blower! Like, seriously. I am late for everything- conference paper submissions, article reviews, returning exams, my own wedding.
Image from brightdrops.com/funny-life-quotes
And you know what has happened to me because of all this lateness? I’ve become a tenured professor of political science and a published author. The “real world” has not punished me too severely for my habitual lateness,* so why would I institute arbitrary punishment for my students? I think of it this way- there is hot and cold weather in the real world, but we don’t force ourselves to live in those conditions all day if we can help it. If it is cold outside, we turn on the heat in our offices, classrooms, and homes. If it is hot outside, we turn on the air conditioning. If we wouldn’t deny our students heat in our classrooms, in preparation for the cold outside, then we shouldn’t be excessively hardassed in preparation for the possibility that they will encounter hardasses in the future.
And everything I’ve been late on, I’ve had (what I believe to be) a good reason- I had other things to do, or care obligations, or I just forgot because life is busy sometimes. All of which apply to my students as much or more than they do to me- students have other classes, work and care obligations, and lead busy lives, without the privileges that come with being a tenured professor.
Due dates are important, and there are consequences to missing some of them, but what is the real consequence of a student submitting work late in my class? It may be slightly less convenient for me? Modified self-grading has really eased my grading burden significantly- I get to provide comments only, in conversation with students’ own self-grading reflections. I have heard some instructors offer different deadlines based on how much feedback students would like- the later they submit work, the less feedback they get, but the work is always accepted. Any inconvenience to me is far outweighed by the fact that I get to say, and really mean, that it is never too late to catch up in my class. If a student is willing to do the work, then I want them to do it, whether that’s in the schedule that I set up originally, or in the time that works best for them.
If you’re still not convinced, check out Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope (well worth your time to read!) or if you’re pressed for time at the moment, Barrie Gelles’ recent blog post.
*Being late is still a jerk thing to do, and I’m honestly working on it. But I’ve had decades to improve, and am still not great at it, so extending the same flexibility to my students that I demand in my own professional life is the least I can do.
Happy New Year!
One of my favorite things about academia is we get extra New Years- every time a semester ends is an opportunity to reflect on how things went, and think about how to improve in the future. (my long winter & summer breaks mean I usually do this at the starts of things too. I like celebrating, don’t @ me).
So how did this very unusual semester of Spring 2020 go? I set out from the beginning, and reaffirmed when we switched to emergency distance learning, that I didn’t want to lose anyone- we would get through this together. On this measure, I was not wholly successful- in my early (9:10am!) class, 20 students dropped or never submitted even a single assignment, while in my 10:20am class there were 13 (incidentally, what a difference that early hour makes- attendance for our 5 in-person sessions before the emergency switch really helped lay the groundwork, and the earlier class was more sparsely attended then, so the difference is less surprising). Under ordinary circumstances, this would be not great, but given that New York has been and continues to be battered by COVID-19, which has been disproportionately dangerous to essential workers and ethnic and racial minority groups, which make up a large part of the students at my campus, I think we did as well as we could possibly have done. No student signed up for trying to juggle all of their courses online, possibly having to share devices with family that also needed to work or do school work from home, while facing economic strife, during a global pandemic. As I repeatedly told my students, my class is not your first priority and that’s okay.
And that’s one of the lessons I’ll take into next semester. In the fall, my students will be facing the psychological and economic fallout of the pandemic, and the likelihood of a resurgence is high. CUNY has yet to make a formal announcement for the fall, but my department has declared all of our classes online for Fall 2020, and I am really glad about this decision, because it seems like the only right one- my class is not worth anyone dying for. It’s not worth anyone getting really sick over, whether it’s a student, their family member, or someone they sit near on mass transit. That doesn’t mean I don’t think my class is important (I do!) or that my students’ education is not important (it really is!), it just means that it’s not worth dying for. In all of the discussions circulating in higher ed about whether to open, how to open, we need to open!!!, I think this is the big thing missing. I won’t try to argue that half-assed emergency distance learning is better than non-pandemic teaching. But NON-PANDEMIC TEACHING IS NOT AN OPTION RIGHT NOW!!! And it won’t be in the fall, either. So what changes to our classes can we make now to give us the best possible courses next term?
Things that worked extremely well for me this semester were flexible deadlines, students getting to choose their own assignments, modified self-grading and open-book unlimited-time tests. I’ll never go back to using closed-book or timed tests online- this reduced stress for students (essential during a pandemic, but a good goal during any time) and let them focus on learning, without me having to manage some surveillance technology or gatekeeping to control them. Our use of self-grading also reduced stress, because students were not as worried about their grade (since they were grading each assignment themselves), and the assignments were much better, because students were more familiar with the requirements of each assignment, since they had to assess themselves. Not only did students appreciate these things (I got many, many emails thanking me), it was actually much easier to manage administratively. I got to focus on giving useful feedback, not justifying the grades I assigned (since I didn’t assign them ;o). Whenever a student would send a worried email that they were going to be late, or needed more time, instead of wasting time demanding and verifying proof of their need, I got to quickly reply that they are the experts in what they need, and that the deadlines are flexible for this reason. Students who had problems at one or more points in the semester were able to catch up and complete their work- and isn’t that what we want, instead of nailing students on deadlines we impose? I also got to read really interesting projects, because students got to choose learning activities that were interesting to them, instead of slogging through what I required.
Of course, there are areas where I want to improve. I opted to go wholly asynchronous when we switched to distance learning, for practical and equity reasons. But I ended up missing the personal connection with students and we were never really able to develop a community of learners. Creating that sense of community is my main area for improvement in the fall. My campus is allowing us to indicate whether our fall classes will be synchronous or asynchronous, so I’m requesting synchronous (at least students will know what they are signing up for in advance), but I’m going to be a bit sneaky- each student will only be synchronous for 1 hour per week. I plan on dividing each class into 6 groups (or squads, or pods, or teams?), and I’ll meet with 2 groups during each class time- that way we’re never more than a group of 8 or 9, and we can actually talk with each other. This should hopefully balance the desire for facetime with limited device/bandwidth access, as well as give students dedicated time (the other 2 class hours) during the week to work on our class work (either individually or with their team). I’ll also tell each day’s group of two teams that if they can unanimously decide on a better hour to meet, we can move the session. I’ll encourage groups to develop their own norms and means of communicating, so they can help each other along (instead of having to depend on me). I’ll offer group versions of some assignment options, and most of our synchronous sessions will be planned/led by one of the groups.
Because of the emergency switch after the semester started, I offered students the option to blog in Blackboard (our LMS, which I hate) or on the CUNY Academic Commons (on our class site or their own). Most students opted for Blackboard, and I can’t say I blame them- it was already set up, and their other classes were likely using Blackboard too. But it’s a lost opportunity- knowing how to use Blackboard is only useful to use Blackboard- it’s not a transferable skill. Building out a website on the CUNY Academic Commons, however, means students have to figure out WordPress, which is a completely transferable skill that is actually not that hard to master. Next semester, I’ll require students to make their own sites which will contain all of their work for the semester (they’ll get to choose the sharing level of their site, as students have different preferences about privacy that must be respected). To support them, however, I’ll spend a chunk of this summer making how-to guides and videos for getting started, using as many different devices as I can find in my family (phone, laptop, tablet, etc), since I know students have different devices and bandwidths available. This will also ensure that I understand the fullness of what I’m asking them to do- i.e. I think it’s probably not that hard to run a WordPress site on a smartphone, but after this summer, I’ll know exactly how hard it is and how to do it, so I can help students who have trouble.
Finally, I am planning to change my slides. American Government is constantly changing, so I update them every semester, but these are really designed for use in-class. Without me guiding the class through them, they’re not that useful. Recording me going through them is extremely boring (not just for me- for any poor soul forced to listen or watch!)- there is a magic that happens in the classroom with these slides that doesn’t translate to online. So new slides are in order- I’m trying to think of ways to make them more self-guided and interactive, such as directing students out to data sources and government websites so they can play with them directly, instead of looking at the pieces I pulled in.
So that’s a lot for just one summer! And I’ve got a paper and a book to write, as well as some big family projects, so that’s a lot. On the brightside, we are committed to staying very close to home, so I’ve got some time. I’ll check back in as the summer progresses, and see how many of these words I’ll have to eat.
