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Here’s an interesting activity to try with your colleagues….
Walk into a room before a meeting, and start to (gently) complain about another meeting you’ve recently had (principals - admin meetings or school board meetings work great for this).
“Oh my gosh…” you’ll say. “I know this stuff is important, but I’m about meeting-ed out!”
(January is often littered with PD days to kick-start the new year, so this should be a great time for an activity likes this).
Have some fun with it by bringing up that “the meeting we had last week should have been an email” and say “they’d probably take half as long if we’d stay on topic”.
If your acting skills are any good (or if you’re being genuine!) then you’ll no doubt illicit a few responses from your colleagues about why they hate meetings. Good. Get them talking.
After a few minutes, go ahead and say “Ok...so seriously...now that we’ve admired the problem and all wallowed in how miserable our meetings are….can we all mutually agree to NOT do these things?” Then, generate all the fake enthusiasm of a late night infomercial salesman pitching a self-cleaning table cloth and say “BUT WAIT! DON’T WE ALREADY DO THAT!?”
In my last newsletter I shared a step-by-step guide to “reboot” struggling classes and make your “worst” class your “best” class. But this time of year can be a great time to “reboot” our meeting structures, too.
We frequently have ground rules for our meetings (often called “norms”) but the truth is that often “normal” behavior is appalling and not befitting our professional learning community.
Propose reviewing (or creating) these rules and refer to them as “Working Agreements”. They are things we can all agree too in order to make our meetings engaging and productive, not something painful to be dreaded.
When working with schools I do this very exercise, but groups undoubtedly often come back to variations of the same working agreements, with their own unique spins. Things like “start and end on time” as well as “be an engaged participants” are great places to start. “Everyone weighs in” encourages the sharing of the microphone and prohibits one person from dominating the conversation. Decide how your group feels about the role of technology in your meetings, what should be done ahead of time, and most importantly, what will happen when someone violates an “agreement”. Spend time reflecting at the end of each meeting on how you did with your agreements, and have fun with the “roles” each person can take on to ensure a productive meeting.
As always, I’m happy to help you and your teams in anyway that I can. I offer FREE 30 Minute consultations over phone, Skype, or Google Hangout and would be happy to discuss ways to help your meetings become more focused on learning. Just reply to this email to set it up!
Check out my latest article below and I’ve taken the liberty of linking a few others that are relevant to today’s topic as well. Thanks for reading, focus on learning and be great today!
-Mark
When I was a young teacher, there were certain things that veteran teachers would say that would drive me absolutely crazy. Many of them hurt my feelings, others I felt like were self-deprecating, and no one likes to hear people we care about be unnecessarily hard on themselves. Others felt insulting towards the students I loved and would break my heart, while others sadly felt like outright excuses from folks who’d given up on the kids and on themselves.
I thought “I must be naïve” and surely I’ll come to understand or even share these feelings later, but I was wrong. Having worked in education for fifteen years now, many of these statements bother me more than ever. As I began sharing my “Teaching with the Terminator” philosophy with teachers and encouraging them to take responsibility for student learning, I discovered that the same things that frustrated me, frustrated many, MANY other teachers as well.
Below you will find a list of the “21 Things I Hate to Hear Teachers” say, though I’m willing to admit it’s an incomplete list. READ MORE…
Almost every school I’ve worked in or with, has as a part of it’s regular PLC collaborative time a type of meeting in which they discuss concerns educators are having regarding specific students. These meetings have the best of intentions - after all, everybody working together to solve a challenging problem can only help, right?
Sure. In theory.
Except often these meetings, well intentioned and full of caring, empathetic professionals, can often deteriorate quickly into collective griping about student behavior, or worse, specific students. While “venting” is one thing, a room full of people complaining to / at each other has perhaps never made anyone feel better. And when the topic of our complaining is the very kids we’re committed to helping? That just creates an inherent animosity between teachers and students that is not healthy to their education or our careers.
Take a look at these ten tips for keeping your “student concerns” meetings solution oriented, positive and effective. READ MORE….
If you’ve worked in education for longer than a cup of coffee, you know that collaboration is all the rage in school leadership circles these days. And with good reason. For all too long teachers have been connected only by hallways and parking lots, which is a shame given that in many cases the person next door can be a valuable resource.
If two heads are better than one, than a team of teachers collaborating are certainly more equipped to provide an education for students than a single educator working in isolation. The problem is, all too often there is ZERO collaboration taking place. Instead, people are simply “meeting”. READ MORE...
 I offer FREE 30 minute consultations to help you or your colleagues overcome their biggest obstacles to student learning. Let me know how I can help you and your students focus on learning and be great today!
-Mark
markclements@Edunators.com
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