I had the opportunity to attend the workshop entitled ‘ELT Management in Action’ that took place in Cappadocia on 27-28 April 2018. The workshop was organized by Pearson and brought the directors of schools of languages across Turkey together. This two-day event started with a gala dinner where the participants had the opportunity to meet the other participants and continued with a full-day workshop on the following day. The second day started with Andy Hockley, a freelance educational management consultant and teacher trainer, who set the scene for the rest of the day. The participants were asked to work in groups of 5-6 people on the given scenario related to management considering the following questions:

  • What do you need to make sure gets organized?
  • Who do you need to talk to?
  • How will you manage this change?
  • What will be done and when?

The groups were supposed to work on the scenario for 2 hours and prepare a presentation that would respond to the aforementioned questions, which was followed by a gallery walk activity. Each group had a presenter who was responsible for sharing their presentations with the other groups and the other group members were supposed to listen to each group’s presentation and make comments and/or ask questions. At the end of this gallery walk activity, Andy Hockley announced winners in different categories such as the best presentation, logistics, change management etc. Afterwards, Andy Hockley summarized all the discussions and shared what he would do if he was to manage the school in the given scenario.

I really liked the idea that the participants were given a scenario which required change management and we were supposed to discuss ways of handling this change and come up with our own plan as a group. During the group work, I had the opportunity to listen to different directors from both state and foundation universities. It was also nice to listen to Andy Hockley talking about why people resist change, how one can handle a change, and models of change management relating them to the given scenario in the final part of the workshop. Finally, I was happy to learn that the group I was a member of got the prize in the category of change management.