Many of my administrator colleagues in English language programs began their careers as teachers, and at some point moved into management. Some are solely administrators, others are somehow able to continue balancing teaching and management responsibilities. A move from the classroom to the office continues to be a means of career progression for many in the field. If you are thinking of making this move, you might be asking what management is and whether it is for you.
You can find many definitions of management, and none is complete or perfect. Here is how I see the job of management.
Organizations of any kind have goals, the things they want to achieve. In education our goals might include student learning, educational research, advocacy for learners, and (in some institutions) making a profit. Look at the mission statement of your school or program if you want to know its goals. Where I work, our mission includes Improving students’ English language knowledge and skills, deepening their intercultural understanding, and promoting their personal development.
In order to achieve an organization’s goals, we have resources. Resources include:
- People (human resources)
- Money (financial resources)
- Physical space
- Equipment and technology
- Time
With infinite resources we could do anything, but resources are always limited. We don’t have an infinite supply of teachers, we have to work within budgets, and we only have so many classrooms and offices. We have limited space and budget for equipment, and of course, there is never enough time. As managers, it is our job to utilize our resources effectively and efficiently to meet our goals.
Effectiveness refers to the extent to which we meet our goals. For example, if students learn what we specified in the curriculum, teaching has been effective.
Efficiency is the ratio of inputs to outputs. The fewer inputs (resources) we apply in the achievement of our goals, the more efficient we are.
Managers have to balance the often competing needs for effectiveness with those of efficiency. To see what I mean, look at some questions relating to efficiency and effectiveness in the management of a school or program.
| Resource | Efficiency Questions | Effectiveness Questions |
| Money |
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| People |
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| Physical Space |
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| Equipment and technology |
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| Time |
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A school or program managed entirely on ‘efficiency’ lines is tough to work in – everyone is asked to do as much as possible with as little as necessary. A school run with purely ‘effectiveness’ considerations without an eye on efficient use of resources might be wonderful but not sustainable. The point of management is to find the right balance between these two sets of questions. If you move into management, you will likely find yourself caught every day in this tension with the need for efficiency while trying to meet your program’s goals effectively. A good manager has a sincere desire to deliver the best possible result while drawing on resources adequately and judiciously.
Needless to say, handling this tension doesn’t describe the entirety of any manager’s job, but I think it’s one of the most essential roles of school and program administrators. It can create its own variety of stress and so is not for everyone. But all schools and programs need good managers. Is this the right challenge for you?
When I create an I-20 form for a prospective student, the SEVIS system has me choose “Language Training” as the student’s area of study. I’m always intrigued by this choice of words. Why is learning English considered ‘training’ and not ‘education?’ Are other disciplines – math, the sciences, English literature and foreign languages – considered to be training?
colorful mailings from colleges in our mailbox every day. It’s a competitive market for students, and college marketing offices need to make their institutions attractive. 
If you’ve been teaching English as a second or foreign language for a few years, you’ve probably taught using a wide variety of textbooks. Over the years, textbooks have evolved from layouts you could easily create (now anyway) in Microsoft Word, to sophisticated, full-color extravaganzas that seem designed to cater to limited modern attention spans. Textbooks also mirror evolving approaches to language teaching, from the decontextualized sentences of grammar-translation, through the drill-and-kill repetitions and substitutions of audiolingualism, information gaps and situational dialogues of communicative language teaching, to…whatever it is we have now, which is not entirely clear. 
Assigning final grades to students has been done in various ways over the years. In some contexts, everything rested on a final exam – this was the case with the O-level and A-level exams I took in a British high school ‘back in the day.’ Then ‘continuous assessment’ became popular, making the final grade a composite of grades for assignments completed during the course, either with our without a final exam. This approach became popular in U.S. intensive English programs, where the final grade might be made up of homework assignments, projects, tests and quizzes, and the usually ill-defined ‘participation’ by the student. 
If you’ve had anything to do with curriculum over the past few years, then you’ve likely wrestled with the terms ‘goal,’ ‘outcome,’ and ‘objective.’ It’s not surprising they cause confusion. After all,
programs, whether teachers or staff, are extremely kind, generous with their time and attention, and committed to their students. You’d think in an environment with people like that, students would always be well served. But in some cases the organization is set up in such a way that good student service is impeded. Here are three examples of organization-level problems and a suggested approach to addressing each one. 
In 1939, the American writer Ernest Vincent Wright published a novel named Gadsby. Nothing too special about that you might think, except that this 50,000-word work of fiction did not contain the letter ‘e.’ Can you imagine even writing more than a word or two without the letter ‘e’? Me either.
It has been a quiet week for English language programs. That is something to be thankful for after the craziness that was visited on us in the first half of July, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a new rule: international students attending institutions that are going to offer their programs entirely online must either transfer to another institution where they can take at least a part of their program face to face, or leave the country. The rule of course impacted students at the hundreds of English language programs and schools across the country.
What does the future hold for English language programs in the U.S., once we get over the current crisis caused by the COVID-19 virus? Will things return ‘to normal,’ with students traveling here to study at English language schools and university-based programs? Or will a wholesale rush to online learning result in the virtual disappearance of in-person programs?
The novel coronavirus has gone pandemic, our entire cohort of students has canceled, and we’ll be closed for the semester. While it’s encouraging that faculty are willing to re-tool quickly for online teaching, we are a study abroad program where English happens to be taught, and you cannot study abroad online. It’s true that many English language programs have ‘gone online’ to try and ride out the crisis, but this is a stopgap measure that will not satisfy students over the long haul. The corona crisis forces us to consider just what English language programs in the U.S. actually are, and what value they offer to their students.
Yes, a teacher asked me this recently. While her question seemed mostly an expression of frustration at what she saw as a loss of control over her teaching, it is also a question that educators should consider seriously. After all, education proceeded quite well for thousands of years without SLOs. Socrates never referred to them, nor did Jesus, the Buddha, or any other well-known teacher you could name.
Back in the day, if you were ‘teaching to the test,’ you weren’t really doing your job as a teacher. You isolated the pieces of knowledge and the skills that you knew would come up on the test and taught them to the exclusion of broader educational activities that might have enriched the students’ experience. You might have done this to ensure a high pass rate, which reflected well on you as a teacher if the higher-ups were judging you on your students’ test scores. But teaching to the test was frowned upon as a kind of shortcut for both teacher and students.
How many times are ESL students told to ‘go out and speak English?’ The possibility of using the target language outside the classroom and the school is surely one of the strongest rationales for learners to come to an English-speaking country to learn the language. Theorists of second language acquisition have proposed that ‘negotiation of meaning’ with native speakers will provide learners with the comprehensible input they need to make progress, making access to native speakers important to that progress. As Bonny Norton points out in the 2nd edition of her book Language and Identity, getting that access is not so simple.
If you read anything about curriculum design these days, or attend a presentation or workshop, you will learn only one model. Backward design starts at the end, defining student learning outcomes, then working backward through assessment, teaching and learning objectives, content and sequencing, and finally teaching and learning. This approach to curriculum design is so pervasive that anyone new to education might think there is no other way.
Backwards-design curriculum is a relatively new approach to curriculum design that is finding its way into many disciplines. In English language teaching, backwards design originated with English for Specific Purposes courses (such as English for pilots or English for the food service industry) where it was important to specify what learners should be able to do following the course or program. In the US, it was given a boost by the accreditation requirements of ACCET and CEA, themselves subject to the mandates of a federal Department of Education that sought greater accountability from educational institutions, starting with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
We are used to talking a lot about quality in education. It used to be normal to describe quality in terms of inputs: faculty to student ratios, faculty degrees, school facilities, test scores of the incoming class, and so on. More recently, we have been pressured by government departments, funding agencies, and accreditors to prove our quality in terms of outcomes: can-do statements, demonstrable skills gained, behavioral changes in our students at the end of their course or program.
SEVP 
At a recent professional development session at 
Most intensive English programs offer a placement test or a set of procedures to try and ensure that students are receiving instruction at an appropriate level. Minimally, a multiple-choice test is offered at the school on the first day, or online. Other procedures typically include an interview and a written assignment that are assessed by the program’s teachers.
Many IEPs are staffed by people who started out as classroom teachers. This can be a positive thing, but management skills – especially the skills of managing people – have to be learned. One important skill that can be challenging to learn is delegation. Knowing when and how to delegate is important for all academic directors, student services managers, and program coordinators. Here are some tips for delegating.
As competition for students increases, intensive English programs should consider the price of their program. The pricing decision must take into account the overhead and operating cost of the program, as well as revenue and margin goals. But a conscious pricing strategy also positions the program in relation to competitor programs. Prospective students evaluate the program price against the perceived value the program will have for them. Here are five examples of intensive English program pricing strategies I have encountered over the past few years, each of which exemplifies a pricing strategy that worked, or didn’t, for the program. Prices are for tuition for a four-week general English program.
How much freedom do intensive English program (IEP) teachers have to design their courses, choose their materials, and teach to their interests? How much should they? These questions become ever more compelling as accreditation standards push programs to be accountable for their outcomes.
“Can keep up with an animated discussion, identifying accurately arguments supporting and opposing points of view.” “Can tell a story or describe something in a simple list of points.” If your program is using Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) descriptors as its outcomes statements, you’ll be familiar with ‘can-do’ statements like these.
There are few obligations for faculty and staff that cause knots in the stomach and departmental wrangling than preparing the accreditation self-study. It is often viewed as a burden, a distraction from everyone’s ‘real’ work, and a process of bureaucratic box-checking or of trying to fit the round peg of the program into the square hole of accreditation requirements.
For the past few years, ESL teachers have been pushed to focus their efforts on helping their students achieve ‘measurable objectives.’ Am I the only person who finds this a strange idea? Measuring something is a matter of determining how much of something there is. To measure, we need a unit of measurement: inches and feet, centimeters and meters, pounds and ounces, grams and kilograms. By agreeing on standardized units of measurement, we can determine, objectively, the quantity of something.
Wrapped up in the term ESL (English as a Second Language) is an assumption that language, above all, is what students need to succeed in an English-speaking environment. The same kind of assumption can be found in the name of the most popular standardized U.S. admissions test for international students, the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) lists levels of language proficiency by skill, and many ESL programs continue to organize their curricula on the basis of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing skills. The field of SLA (Second Language Acquisition) is a major feeder discipline in ESL teacher preparation programs.
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