Understanding the Instructional Manager Role

Instructional Managers are expected to be a resource to help instructors organize and effectively communicate with their instructional teams and students, and manage the physical and/or online classroom environment.

The specific responsibilities of an Instructional Manager will depend on the needs of the instructor and course. There are several areas of course and classroom management that Instructional Managers frequently handle. Depending on the needs of the course (course structure, number of students, etc.), an instructor may choose to work with multiple, specialized Instructional Managers.

To be a highly effective Instructional Manager, it is important to know your responsibilities and where to find the resources to carry them out. The first thing that you will do (in the best case scenario, before the semester begins) is meet with your instructor (or an experienced IM from their class) and determine what your responsibilities will be. If your instructor is new to using the Instructional Manager role, the two of you may be working together to figure out how the role best fits into the team for that class. If they have used a team before, they will be more likely to already have a set of specific responsibilities in mind for you.

Highly effective Instructional Managers take responsibility for maintaining communication with their instructors and any other members of the team with whom they are working.

Instructional Managers often maintain multiple lines of communication. For example, they might communicate with their instructor primarily through e-mail in addition to weekly meetings, and also establish a web- or application-based chat forum where the students on the team can communication with each other quickly and informally.

Effective Instructional Managers learn which members of the team prefer different forms of communication. For example, if they notice that their instructor never seems to read or respond to their e-mail, they might rely more on meeting and communicating with them verbally (though follow-up summary e-mails of what you talked about are always a good idea!).

Most importantly, effective Instructional Managers are responsive. The instructor and other team members are able to get in touch with the Instructional Manager in a reasonable amount of time through the established channels.

Highly effective Instructional Managers understand and carry out their assigned responsibilities, but they also understand the larger goals that they are supporting for the course. They act flexibly to support those goals, rather than seeing their role as a checklist of individual responsibilities (not that we don't love checklists as tools--we do!).

The most effective Instructional Managers "take charge" of one or more areas of course and/or team management. Their instructors trust them to make judgement calls, take initiative, and have a shared understanding of when they should "check in" with their instructors before acting and when they may act on their own.

Highly effective Instructional Managers also notice when things are "falling through the cracks." They approach their instructors and offer solutions. Instead of asking, "Is there anything that I can do to help?" they say, "I think that I could help you with this, and here's how I think I could do it. What do you think?"

Finally, highly-effective Instructional Managers do not wait around for their instructors to "do their part"--the proactively reach out to see if they can help. Instructors are usually busy people and it is easy for them to sometimes forget things or find it difficult to get everything done on time. For example, if an instructor said that they would send a file to the team by Monday morning and Monday afternoon comes with no email from the instructor, an effective IM will reach out to the instructor with a reminder. Or, if an instructor has not reached out to the IM to schedule a weekly meeting by a couple of weeks before the semester, an effective IM will reach out with a list of days/times that would work for them and asks which of those times would work for the instructor.

To be highly effective, an Instructional Manager needs to reserve most of the time and energy devoted to serving a course for their management responsibilities.

For example, if it is customary for an instructor to assign each preceptor or TA a few groups of students to help during class, the Instructional Manager should likely be excluded from this. Instead of focusing on helping a particular set of student groups, they might be responsible for handling elements of classroom management and overseeing Learning Assistants during class. For example, they might find themselves identifying which Learning Assistants are struggling during class activities and working alongside them to provide support, coaching and feedback.

As another example, a graduate Teaching Assistant serving as an Instructional Manager might have fewer or no grading duties, as the expectation is that they will be spending their time on other responsibilities.

If an Instructional Manager finds themself overwhelmed by having their management responsibilities added on top of the expectations of another role, it is reasonable for them to suggest that some of their non-management responsibilities be assigned to other members of the team.

In such a case, it is useful to suggest a specific idea. For example, they might say, "I've noticed that it's hard for me to find time to record students' participation and follow up with students who have missed class, because I'm also supposed to be writing feedback on students' assignments. Maybe each of the Learning Assistants could take another student group for feedback to take that off of my hands."