Making Sure Meetings Are a Good Use of Time

If we create a running list of items that teachers consider to be poor uses of time, many things are jockeying for top position: interruptions to instruction, purloined planning time, and standardized assessment administration, to name a few. One pervasive practice may easily make it to the top of the leaderboard as most hated: meetings.

To be clear, this is not to say that teaching teams do not find their gatherings useful. Rather, it is the mandated meetings with administrators and instructional leaders at the helm that have far less buy-in. Controversial or not, it might be time to consider pushing most meetings aside in favor of an embedded approach to communication and professional growth.

USE MEETING TIME MORE EFFICIENTLY

Focus on professional learning and team planning. Nearly everyone would agree that we attend too many meetings, but that’s not the only issue. More often than not, the meetings are either poorly conceived or targeted toward the wrong audience. Therefore, making the most out of the meetings that do happen is essential.

For example, teachers rightly feel that any meeting that attempts to convey any kind of learning as a one-and-done experience is meaningless. Not to be confused with professional development, which is defined as a single training session with the intent of individual accountability in terms of follow-up, professional learning is a repeated series of sessions that occur over time to help teachers achieve growth in a specific area. For teachers, professional learning is the far better pathway, provided that they have been brought into the process of determining what the learning focus should be. 

The more budget-friendly option of using in-house expertise rather than hiring consultants is an ideal way to elevate instructional practice within school walls. Recruiting teachers to lead professional learning not only is empowering for them; teachers also respond better to learning from one another rather than people they have never met (and will likely never see again). Team or professional learning community planning time, which should be an existing structure in functional schools, is an even more important avenue for helping teachers experience valuable learning without having to add another meeting to the calendar.

Ideally, this time should go beyond what many consider survival mode, which is the day-to-day planning of lessons. Instead, while curriculum planning is always a good idea through the use of backward design, weekly meetings can hold a different focus for determining student progress, such as “data chats” about their work or “kid talk” to isolate reasons for student struggle and success.

Host optional gatherings on a regular basis. Teachers spend a lot of time moving around, whether they “float” into different classrooms to teach or travel throughout the building. To change things up, school leaders can save people a trip by positioning themselves in common areas that teachers frequent to be available for conversation. Once teachers become accustomed to seeing leaders on a regular basis and everyone gets to know one another, avenues of communication will open up naturally and make it easier to share information.

In addition, optional meetings make it possible for people who want to learn about a specific topic to explore areas of interest without requiring everyone else to do the same. For example, administrators might offer to meet with new teachers on a monthly basis as an additional support to discuss necessary information, such as how to enter grades or instill strong structures for classroom management. Another strategy might be to offer professional learning on a topic that teachers have requested, such as helping emerging multilingual learners develop language skills in core content classes.

MEET LESS, ACCOMPLISH THE SAME OBJECTIVES

Stop meeting just to meet. While meetings should certainly be targeted to authentic professional needs, there is nothing wrong with taking any meetings off the calendar if they serve no purpose. Years ago, I remember a supervisor instructing me to overpack a meeting agenda because that way, we would be sure to take up the allotted hour. In many schools, the unfortunate reality is that meeting preparation and execution have become rote. We hold time in our calendars, fill agendas to a specific time frame, and remain rigid about upholding this structure even when there is absolutely no need to gather. 

In organizational expert Joseph McCormack’s Brief, he uses the term “meeting villains” in reference to some of the biggest mistakes we make with setting up meetings, and he also identifies some ways to get out of autopilot mode. For example, McCormack points out, “When you’re in a meeting, you’re not working. You’re stuck in a conference room, and all your productivity has screeched to a halt.” As an alternative, he suggests that we get out of the rut of the “predictable and mundane” and interrogate the need to meet a lot more closely.

Streamline operational communications. By now, we’re all familiar with the phrase, “Yet another meeting that could have been an email.” However, emails are not always the right method for cutting down on the operational agenda items, mostly because inboxes become inundated and people stop reading their messages. 

To ensure that teachers receive important action items and updates, a method like a weekly running updates document is far more effective, especially if actions are highlighted or written in bold to catch the eye. Leaders can update the document whenever they need to. It helps if this document exists online so that the most recent version can always be accessed and anyone can review older updates to determine what they might have missed. If urgent items then come up, an email to share need-to-know details will garner more attention because it is not a regular occurrence.

When teachers are asked to pick between time and money as the asset they would most like more of, the most common answer is time. Minutes and hours are precious, and anyone who wastes them can expect to encounter justifiable resentment. By rethinking the way we organize meetings in schools and jettisoning many unnecessary gatherings, leaders can show genuine respect for the ways that teachers allot their time in each professional day’s work.