Teaching at Elite Education Institute
The Elite Education Institute was founded in the year 1987 by Patrick Park in Rowland Heights, CA (Brubacher, 2017). It was started as a small center for tutoring. However, it has currently developed and has expanded into many parts of the world where it has more than 40 locations in different countries. In any given institution, not all of its systems and processes are very efficient and accurate. Some of them are not run in the right way or may even be biased. Therefore, review of the institution’s systems and processes is very significant for identifying the weak areas, the biased areas and also the different departments which require improvement. This is for the purpose of ensuring efficient management and overall routines of the institution in order to offer the best services and programs at the same time minimizing expenses and realizing higher profits or benefits.
This piece of work will, therefore, evaluate Elite Education Institute’s current status of systems and processes and provide recommendations for the improvement of its teaching, student pastoral care, workplace communication, staff management, and conflict resolution. Additionally, the reasons as to why this institution should accept the provided recommendations will be explained.
Teaching refers to the exchange of knowledge and experience which aims at enhancing the growth of a person psychologically and intellectually facilitated by a person or an artifact and this knowledge and experience are usually concerned with a particular discipline.
Elite Education Institute has laid down several policies, practices as well as procedures that teachers are entitled to enforce to the learners. It is the responsibility of the teacher to ensure that these policies, practices, and procedures are adhered to and if not, then the right actions should be taken on the culprit. Teachers in this institution ensure that the work that the students submit, whether assignments or term papers acknowledge the proper words, ideas, and designs that are stipulated and recognized by the institution. Every student is entitled to submit original and personal work unless collaboration is required, for example in group work assessments (Van Zanten and Maxwell, 2015). The teachers also ensure that the students are equipped with a clear understanding of the expectations of assessment conditions such as the marking criteria, the required practices of source acknowledgment as well as the requirements of the assessment task. The academic staff who is involved in the marking of any work is provided with an electronic copy of the work to be marked if at all it is requested. Both the teacher and the student have the collective responsibility of upholding all the values of the academic integrity outlined in the policy of this institution and also discouraging plagiarism and other academic forms of misconduct.
In order to ensure that academic integrity is upheld in this institution, all academic staffs and also students should all be part and parcel of teaching. Academic staffs should make the students aware of the practices of acknowledgment which are required in their different fields of study and as well provide relevant and simple examples concerning what is expected and accepted. The academic misconducts such as plagiarism should be explained to the students comprehensively, including what constitutes to these misconducts and how they can be avoided. In cases of group work assessments, appropriate conditions and expectations should be set and a clear difference between individual work and group work should be made clear. The teachers should actively participate in the checking of plagiarism in order to ensure the originality of the content presented. If any act of plagiarism or any other form of academic misconduct is identified or detected, the right actions should be taken in order to discourage the same in future.
Upholding Academic Integrity
Pastoral care is the commitment and active demonstration of concern and spiritual growth of the student and the school community at large. Pastoral care does not only affect the religious and moral part of a learner’s growth but also influences the social, physical, cognitive and emotional growth. It is through this kind of care where self-esteem, goal-setting, and healthy risk-taking is enhanced (Philpott, 2015). It is therefore very important that students are provided with the proper information, safety, and care.
In Elite Education Institute, students are well informed of the protocols that they should follow. For example, if a student has concerns that are related to experiences in the institution or the course, he or she is encouraged to give the relevant staffs an opportunity and time to respond to the concerns presented. Due to the different cultures that meet in this institution, staffs have been very caring and flexible to accommodate each student. This institution also focuses on the holistic development of the learners and ensures that all the members of the institutional community are engaged in order to ensure they participate in providing pastoral care. However, it should make efforts to ensure that the pastoral care is facilitated through individual approaches, class or groups, the whole school approaches as well as conducting casework. This will ensure that the pastoral care is facilitated efficiently and effectively. Additionally, policies and practices of pastoral care should be reviewed on regular basis in order to make corrections and improvements where necessary. It is significant to note that the pastoral care has a direct relationship and influence on the academic performance of the learners.
Moreover, the staff’s wellbeing should be reviewed in order to assess the functionality and significance of the current policies, procedures, and practices in the institution. The wellbeing of the staff can be improved by appreciating the strength and the achievements of the staff, providing professional learning, implementing policies that reduce or even prevent the stress of the staff, encouraging collaboration with fellow staffs and enabling access of professional advice. If the wellbeing of the staff is well looked at, the staffs themselves will also be more able and motivated to care for the wellbeing of the students too. Furthermore, a permanent pastoral caretaker should be availed in the institution and should have an office from where the students would be visiting to address different issues and concerns that face them. This will ensure that the student’s concerns have an experienced and specialized staff who can give the best advice, direction or support. Peer support programs should also be established as well as making a follow-up on individual student’s progress.
Workplace communication can be seen to mean the transmission of information from one individual or group to another individual or group within an institution through emails, voicemails, notes, and text messages among other forms of communication. It is significant to be noted that communication can either be verbal or non-verbal and if effectively used, it can lead to many advantages such as increasing worker satisfaction, having a positive effect on turnover rates and improving the institutional overall benefits.
Providing Effective Pastoral Care
Many employees in Elite Education Institute tend to have complaints about how busy and chaotic the programs are and also how salaries are not as good as other educational institutions. However, the way they address their issues is according to the institutional policies that have been laid. Therefore, there tend to be no issues of communication disparities even though the workers have different cultural and language backgrounds (Simpson, Clegg and Pitsis, 2014). The management, however, should hire competent workers and make payments which are comparable to other institutions of the same level. Additionally, one individual who was once an employee in this institution argues that the institutional management has got no respect for its employees. He further complained that the management argues to treat the employees as ‘family” but practically treat them unethically. Another former employee argued that there were no chances of bargaining about payments, and at times the payments would even be reduced. Again, he argued that the communication between the employees and the management was very limited. At times programs and daily routines would be changed without the involvement of the teachers, where the students were now the ones to inform the teachers of the changes made. This made the teachers feel not belonging and not being valued.
It is a recommendation that the management changes its attitude towards their employees and ensure that the relevant decision-making involves the teachers or the relevant workers. An institution cannot experience prosperity and success unless there is respect between the employees and management and that there is a proper communication. Precisely, workplace communication obstacles should be identified and corrected at all times. There should be networking and personal contact between employees and fellow employees, and employees and the management. This will ensure close relations and will eventually enhance the institutional overall productivity.
The technology should also be effectively used. For example, following a research that was carried out, 95% of text messages that are sent are opened, while only 25% of emails that are sent are opened (Rajaee and Abdolvand, 2018). In order to ensure effective communication, therefore, it is significant to use text messages when communicating to the managers, employees or fellow workers because it is faster and the recipient tends to have easy and fast access to the message.
Staff management is the control of all processes, systems, and employees within an institution including the provision of training for the employees and assigning of tasks to them. For effective staff management, an institution should have the right employees who are adequate in number and who are in the right positions according to their areas of specification (McCaffery, 2018).
The management at Elite Education Institute is frequently brought down by the many changes of the managers who change the entire working environment every time a new manager comes in. the teachers do not enjoy because of the continued changes. The employer in this institution should make efforts to make sure that the management team is maintained for not less than one year. This ensures that the goals and objectives of the year are worked on by one management team until they are achieved. A manager may tend to fail in putting strategies for the achievement of goals and objectives of the institution just because he or she knows that he or she is leaving.
Improving Staff Well-being
Additionally, the teachers in this institution are underpaid. Measures should be taken to level the payments of the teachers because they may quit the job due to the low payments. A worker should at least receive a substantial pay that will ease his or her basic needs and other secondary needs and also feel motivated to work. Moreover, the payments for teachers in this institution are said to vary from one branch to another. However, it should be noted that the differences in payment from one branch to another should not be that big so as to avoid demotivating workers in a certain branch. Workers from different branches share information on how they are paid. Those whose pay is very little may feel discouraged and hence end up quitting the job.
The Elite Education Institute should hire enough teachers to ensure efficiency where every teacher is allowed to perform to his or her potential but not being overworked. There should be enough trained professionals in teaching in order to satisfy service to the students who are the customers in this case. Trained teachers tend to offer quality services, handle problems that arise professionally and also answer the student’s questions clearly and correctly. Programs for training the employees in this institution should be provided where they are exposed to extra knowledge which is beneficial in their field. Other benefits such as maternal and paternal leaves, trips and outings should be availed in order to motivate the workers.
Conflict resolution is defined as the formal or informal act of settling disputes or problems that arise in an institution which may involve individuals or groups. It is obvious that conflicts are inevitable parts of any working environment. Rahim (2017), defines conflict as a form of social status where individuals or groups have disagreements concerning certain aspects in the institution or may portray emotional hostility to one another. The Elite Education Institute has policies which are formulated on how conflicts should be handled, when and how. If any worker in the institution has any conflict, either with the students, fellow workers or the management team, he or she is required to follow certain procedures for the matter to be addressed. However, certain measures need to be put in place in order to make the resolution of conflicts more fair and efficient (Yang, Lan and He, 2015). Once a conflict arises, the manager or the person acting as a mediator should listen first, and then speaking comes next. It requires a person who sees beyond the incidence and who does not lie on any side of the conflict.
Therefore, the institution should hire a guidance and counseling personnel who will be responsible for handling some cases while the managers should also be good at conflict resolution, decision-making and problem-solving in order to ensure a smooth and peaceful working environment. In a case where one of the parties in a conflict does not have the willingness to calm down and come to an end of the conflict, it should be termed as indiscipline and the right actions taken. An institution should have rational workers who are willing to accept their mistakes and who are ready to make corrections where possible.
It is very significant that the management of Elite Education Institution considers the above-discussed recommendations. For any institution or organization to prosper, reviews are to be done on regular basis. Additionally, there is no one single institution that does not have weaknesses. For the improvement of performance and output, the areas of weakness should be identified and the right measures are put in order to transform them into possible strengths. A stagnant organization often tends to dismiss recommendations which are given and continues to experience loses, employee conflicts and customer satisfaction deficiency.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is evident that any given organization has areas which need to be improved. Realizing a good working environment and healthy relations in the entire organizational community requires unity, professionalism and an excellent management team who control, supervise and plan effectively and efficiently. Every member, therefore, needs to be an active participant in the matters of the organization.
References
Brubacher, J. (2017). Higher education in transition: History of American colleges and universities. Routledge.
McCaffery, P. (2018). The higher education manager’s handbook: effective leadership and management in universities and colleges. Routledge.
Philpott, C. (2015). Creating an in-school pastoral system for student teachers in school-based initial teacher education. Pastoral Care in Education, 33(1), 8-19.
Rahim, M. A. (2017). Managing conflict in organizations. Routledge.
Rajaee H. S., & Abdolvand, N. (2018). Investigating the Effect of Online and Offline Workplace Communication Networks on Employees’ Job Performance: Considering the Role of Culture. Journal of Global Information Technology Management, 21(1), 26-44.
Simpson, A. V., Clegg, S., & Pitsis, T. (2014). “I Used to Care but Things Have Changed” A Genealogy of Compassion in Organizational Theory. Journal of Management Inquiry, 23(4), 347-359.
Van Zanten, A., & Maxwell, C. (2015). Elite education and the State in France: Durable ties and new challenges. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(1), 71-94.
Yang, L., Lan, G. Z., & He, S. (2015). Roles of scholars in environmental community conflict resolution: A case study in contemporary China. International Journal of Conflict Management, 26(3), 316-341.
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