When the Education Week Research Center polled teachers earlier this year on when in their jobs they would like to spend less time, the top answer was meetings, with 33 percent of respondents longing for less meeting time. A flat zero percent of teachers wanted more meetings. Tough beat for meetings!
One solution to that widespread meeting fatigue may be to simply schedule fewer. Just look at the top Facebook comment when we shared the recent news story “Teachers Hate All Those Meetings. Can Principals Find a Workaround?”: “Yes, it’s called an email.”
But what about how to improve the truly necessary staff meetings?
It’s been a question on educators’ minds for a long time. In a 2010 EdWeek Opinion blog post, Illinois administrator Ryan Bretag shared his six steps for planning a meeting that doesn’t leave participants grousing that “this should have been an email.” Step number 1? Leave the one-way information delivery off the agenda.
“Do not treat these as a time for one person after another to stand in front of a large group sharing information,” he warned. Instead, with the proper agenda, faculty meetings can offer fertile opportunities for collaborative learning and growth.
A year earlier, Thomas R. Hoerr was also homing in on the challenge of lackluster meetings with a simple litmus test: Imagine if your faculty meetings were voluntary. If teachers’ response to that prospect is “thanks, but no thanks,” you’ve got a problem on your hands. Turning those meetings into something more than time-wasters starts with unlearning five persistent myths, the school leader wrote in his 2009 opinion essay.
Earlier this year, Opinion contributors Peter DeWitt and Michael Nelson offered some additional tips in “Are Your Staff Meetings Unfocused and Disjointed? Try These 5 Strategies. Before listing out those five strategies, however, they echoed a similar warning by reminding readers that the goal of meetings should be learning together, rather than a forum for leaders to talk at their staff. “Staff meetings are an opportunity for leaders and teachers to work as a collective,” they write, “as opposed to what really happens, which is two different groups sharing a space together.”
That fundamental insight about what separates a productive meeting from a wasteful one wasn’t unfamiliar ground for DeWitt, who has been on the efficient-staff-meetings beat for years now. A consistent through line of the former principal’s advice has been a call to rethink the top-down model of staff meetings. Just like a flipped classroom, as he first explained in 2012, a flipped faculty meeting can allow principals to deliver important content knowledge before the meeting, freeing up in-person time for discussion and collaboration.
Want to know more on what that might look like in practice? DeWitt has you covered:
- 3 Reasons Why Faculty Meetings Are a Waste of Time
- Disconnected School Leadership: 3 Areas of Concern
- 5 Reasons You Should Flip Your Leadership
- Should Teachers Have a Voice in Faculty Meetings?
- A Few Ideas for Flipped Faculty Meetings
- How Reciprocal Teaching Can Transform Your Remote Faculty Meeting
- What Will Be Your Faculty Focus?
- Have You Flipped Your Faculty Meeting Yet?
- 4 Obstacles to Consider When Flipping Leadership
In addition to the frequency and structure of meetings, Edweek Opinion contributors have also eyed behavioral shifts that can make meetings more collaborative.
One Colorado high school administrator has touted her school’s introduction of restorative practices to meeting time, starting with a 15-minute talking circle before each Monday administrative-team meeting.
Despite the busy schedules of everyone involved, those “soft-skill conversations” are well worth the time, Sonja Gedde explained in a February opinion essay. The talking circles both allow leaders to model the type of restorative practices they expect from teachers in the classroom, as well as bring them closer together as a team.
“For approximately 15 minutes each week,” Gedde explained, “we create a foundation of transparency and trust that informs our interpersonal interaction as teammates and permeates our leadership identities. Our talking circle establishes a tone of calm and intentional listening, allowing us to know one another as people first.”
