Brand Course for International Students
Is your college instructor a manager? Discuss in terms of Fayol’s management functions, Mintzberg’s managerial roles, Katz’s skills, the systems perspective, and the contingency perspective.
Teacher’s Analysis (From Stephen P.Robbins)
A college instructor would generally not fall within the definition of a manager when utilizing Fayol’s managerial functions. This is because the relationship between instructors and students. Students are not employees but, more appropriately, clients. In fact, in some cases, an instructor may have little say about the course content or how it is to be taught. In these instances, the instructor clearly makes few decisions. Regardless, college instructors, in their position as teacher (in contrast to a position such as department head) are not managers.
In terms of Mintzberg’s managerial roles, college instructors are perhaps involved in some ways in the interpersonal, informational, and decisional roles. For example, a college instructor could be seen as a liaison (interpersonal role), a monitor and disseminator (both informational roles), and a disturbance handler and negotiator (both decisional roles).
Looking at Katz’s skills, college instructors obviously need a lot of technical skills—in this case, knowledge about the latest research and conceptual developments in a particular discipline. They also need significant human skills as they deal with their students. To a limited extent, the instructor might need to utilize conceptual skills as courses are planned or discussed.
From the systems perspective, the college instructor could be seen as responsible for coordinating the inputs (students, lecture material, classroom equipment, and so forth), processing them through some form of educational presentation (lecture, multimedia presentation, Internet-based instruction, and so forth), in order to produce outputs (student knowledge of a particular discipline, skills in a particular area, and so forth).
Using the contingency perspective, the college instructor would have to look at the various situational variables (who is in class on a particular day, the arrangement of the classroom, available material or equipment, and so forth) in order to most effectively and efficiently do his or her job.
Student’s Analysis
Management Issue: Is your course instructor a manager?
Robbins’ Viewpoint: The course instructor is not a manager. The teacher is a worker while the students is a kind of clients.
Our Viewpoint: The course instructor is a manager in China.
Our Statements:
At first we want to point out that Robbins and us analyze this problem in different background. Most of American schools are privately run and there has president, vice present, headmaster, teachers, students and so on. However, in China, almost all the schools are public owned. So we haven’t anybody who can make profit through the school. To the contrast, the main objective of Chinese schools is not to make profit but cultivate talents to serve our country.
Also, we don’t think the client presented in the standard answer is appropriately used here. Because in traditional business way, client is defined as the person who uses money to buy specific commodities or service, they don’t have the responsibility to cooperate with the teacher and finish the work or assignment they are told to. So, from this point we can see the distinct difference between the student and client. Anyway we admit that receiving knowledge in school is also a kind of enjoying service, but after the service, we are not the so-called clients any more but product, because we have received something different, and we are changed by it. So, the students are definitely not client.
Consequently, we will support our statements from the definition of management, managerial functions, managerial roles, skills, the system perspective, and the contingency perspective.
What is organization and what is manager? According to Robbins, organization is a deliberate arrangement of people to accomplish some specific purpose while manager is someone who works with and through other people by coordinating their work activities in order to accomplish organizational goals. As for our parts, the teacher should be the manager, and teachers and students compose an organization. This organization has a define purpose and it contains more than 2 persons, so management is needed here. The teachers take charge in this system, they plan, organize, lead and control, and they cooperate with the students to achieve the goal—to make the students assimilate the knowledge.
Firstly, we will discuss this problem in the terms of managerial functions with example of our Ms Yu. In the first chapter, Ms Yu wanted to give us an introduction of management, in order to achieve this goal; Ms Yu developed a series of plans and also made PowerPoint to help our understanding. The process of this preparation matches the definition of planning. And in the class and after class, Ms Yu would give us some problems to discuss and solve. We can regard these problems as teaching tasks. And she should decide that how the tasks are grouped, the final decision would be reported to whom, this work is a kind of organizing. Then as a teacher, one of the most important things is to motivate students’ spirit so that we can grasp the content in the class such as question—answer, doing presentation, etc. when Ms Yu did this, which means she is implementing leading function. Furthermore, after the work being done, Ms Yu would compare our answers with the standard answer, if we made some mistakes during the procession; she assumes the responsibility to correct us. This matches the features of controlling function.
Then we will discuss about the managerial roles. As a manager, the teacher should take the roles as interpersonal, informational and decisional. The most important role a teacher plays may be the informational ones. The reality of a teacher’s work is to transmit the knowledge to her students and make sure they can assimilate it. So the teacher’s job is much like the disseminator and the monitor in Mintzberg’s managerial roles. And the necessary roles a teacher should play are the interpersonal ones. Teaching is not equal to giving information, is should also include cooperating with them, taking care of their academy works as well as their mental health. Here a teacher may be the manager who plays the interpersonal roles. The teacher should also plays the decisional roles; she should decide which part of the course is more important and how to be taught in details.
Thirdly, in the terms of managerial skills: any instructor should have basically knowledge and proficiency in certain specialized in order to be a qualified teacher, such as math, English sociology and so on. That is technical skills. As for human skills, during the teaching process, a instructor, no doubt that a instructor may involve to deal with the students and other level mangers or operatives directly or indirectly, so that a instructor can communicate, motivate, lead, and inspire enthusiasm and trust. That is the human skills. In order to make his students to adapt to the society, to meet the society requirements, to be more competitive, any responsible instructor should see, the class that is an organization as a whole, understand the relationships among various different organizations, and visualize the class fits into its broader environment and the development of the society. That is the conceptual skills. .
Fourthly, In the terms of systems perspective: we can consider the class as a system .The students who just step into the campus, the teaching equipments, teaching faculty, the money put into the teaching process, the collected information related to a certain major are, to some extent, inputs. While after the hard working of instructors’ management measures and non-managerial activities, the cooperation between the students and instructors, etc, the inputs are transformed into the outputs. Also during this course, students become professionals and can devote his knowledge, skills, and ideology to serving the society. The instructors can boost his teaching level and some other staffs in this organization become more and more mature and experienced. Even to the universities especially the private universities, they can gain fruitful financial revenue. There are kinds of outputs. During the dynamic course, in order to make the students adapt to the society more flexibly, to ensure all the staffs to coordinate to the reform and changes of the environments and teaching, to make all the members in the systems to be more qualified, some feedbacks are essential and some modulations are necessary and vital to the systems. Consequently, the whole teaching process become interactive, dynamic, circulated, which certainly is an open system.
In addition, from Contingency Perspective; we hold that teacher is a manager from the following five aspects.
1- organizations are different (the size of class; the tape of class is different)
2- facing different circumstances or contingencies (social-need is changing; education system is reforming; equipment is improving and the character, philosophy and interest of students are various)
3- requiring different ways of managing (debate, argument, discussion, other method)(Different languages, various communicateways)
4- contingency variable (in different time to take different measures) (in different place to take different measures)
5- the primary value -stresses (there are no simplistic or universal rules, every class has different rules and the rules is changing as the changing of the environment)
Due to the evidences above, we can get enough reasons to evident our opinion. Different ways of managing are required in different organizations and different circumstances and the teacher use this perspective so skillfully and correctly, so we get the result. There is no doubt that our course instructor is a manager.
学生：王震 向萍 熊秦怡 王剑凌 尤昀君 马欢欢 伍翔 张京 徐东东