LAMSIG news

Given how little I update this blog, it may surprise you to learn that I am the man entrusted with keeping the IATEFL Leadership and Management SIG website up to date.  Well, in the not too distant past it has been relaunched, and I’m actually, amazingly, keeping it up to date.  So I thought I would give you a bit of a guided tour because there’s lot of useful stuff for the LTO Manager that can be found there if you know where to look.

So, the home page is at http://lamsig.iatefl.org/ which will take you to a page that looks something like the one on the left, though the pictures may be different. At the moment we’ve got photos from our most recent event in Izmir in May.

You’ll notice a series of headers at the top which take your further into the site and reveal some of the exciting content contained therein…

I’ll highlight a couple of these, skipping over some of the less interesting ones such as the “Committee” page where you get to see pictures of me and the rest of the reprobates professionals who make up the committee.

Under Community you can find links to our new LinkedIn group which has already started generating discussions on LTO management questions. If you’re a LinkedIn member, go here to sign up for the group. You can also find pictures form recent events – not only the Izmir conference, but the PCE at the last IATEFL conference in Liverpool.

Under Events, there is information about our upcoming events – next year’s PCE on “Creating a culture of resilience and preventing burn out” in Harrogate for example is listed here.  There are also reviews and links to posts and blogs about past events, as well as a list of Webinars that IATEFL is organising.  We (LAMSIG) will also be organising some webinars, so watch this space.

Possibly of greatest interest are the links found under Resources.  Here you will find a link to our new ScoopIt page of links, which may be of interest to language teaching managers.  This page, updated very regularly includes lots of links (currently as I write this there are 162) all of which are possibly interesting – some are specifically related to ELT management, while others are more general, but still I think relevant to us.

Below that on the drop down menu is a page entitled “Archived articles” which is a collection of 46 (46!) articles that have appeared at one time or another in the LAMSIG (or ELTMSIG as was) magazine.  This is a hugely useful resource for everyone, I’d say, so please dig in and find things that may be of use to you.

So, hope that is of value to you, and hope you get involved with the site and LAMSIG in general.  We’re always open to ideas suggestions, requests, articles, links, ideas, proposals, and so on and so forth.  There is also a twitter account for the SIG : @IATEFL_LAMSIG  and even a facebook page (though to be perfectly honest I’m not quite sure what to do with that – any suggestions gratefully received).

Peer Observations

In the most recent edition of the IATEFL Leadership and Management SIG magazine, I had an article entitled “Setting up a Peer Observation Scheme”.  You can find this article attached here.

I hope it is useful.

Hello, again

To kick off my efforts to revitalise this blog, I’d like to announce the launch of the new IATEFL LAMSIG (leadership and Management special interest group) webpage. Even if you’re not a member I think there is a lot of interest there, with among others:

• information about the SIG’s events, including next year’s PCE on “Preventing Academic Manager Burnout” (events>upcoming events)
• a number of articles from past issues of the newsletter covering all aspects of ELT management (resources>archived articles)
• photos from our most recent events (community>photos)
• and others

As part of the new LAMSIG web presence you can also find from that site links to:

• A LinkedIn group for LAMSIG members
• A Scoopit page of up-to-date links on educational leadership and management, which will be kept constantly updated
• A LAMSIG facebook page
• The LAMSIG twitter account

The intention is to bring together academic and other managers in ELT to share ideas, questions, problems and best practices.  So, bookmark it!

Harry Potter and educational leadership

I recently wrote a guest post on Ken Wilson’s blog, about my days as an EFL teacher and how I knew somebody (a fellow ELT-er) who later came to be extremely famous.

Anyway, I thought I’d highlight it here and use it to segue neatly (or perhaps inelegantly) into a link to a great article I read last year about the differing educational leadership styles of Albus Dumbledore and Dolores Umbridge (even if you’ve never read Harry Potter and consequently have no idea who these people are, the article is still worth reading)