In education, we need to learn to be prompt, efficient, and to the point with meetings.
We have a “meeting” problem in education – meaning that we meet far too often and far too long when we do meet. People don’t like to work for inefficient organizations. I would work for $10k less a year than to meet after school every, single week AND lose all of my planning time. When I first came to Kingsport, I was struck by how often they met and how long the meetings were. Ya’ll, we were sitting through meetings that were 2-3 hours long. If I could have turned the moving truck around, I would have done it.
I am the kind of person who has to learn information in small chunks, especially if it is boring. Regardless of how good the minister or preacher is, after about an hour….I am looking at my watch and rolling around in my chair. Remember that scene where Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter is having that pen write on Harry’s hand? Yeah, that is me in a long meeting! I dread them. Maybe I have ADHD, or just maybe I am allergic to really bad staff meeting content and/or delivery.
We say in teaching that we want to do what is best for students. Trapping teachers in meetings is not what is best for them, and it definitely ain’t what is best for students. Why? Well, teachers could be doing “teacher things” instead of praying for a power outage or water outage or WIFI outage while in a staff meeting. “Teacher things” are things like making phone calls, building creative lessons, assessing student work, replying to emails, or just going home at normal hours like everybody else.
Here me on this….long and frequent staff meetings are a sign of a grossly inefficient workplace. Meetings reduce productivity and frustrate staff. Productivity is almost always done outside of meetings. Why? We teach students. When we aren’t teaching students and when we aren’t preparing to teaching students….we are not being productive.
How do we fix this?
- I would probably get rid of the mid-management layer of supervisors or instructional designers. This is a hard truth. Many of them have nothing better to do (in order to show productivity) than to meet with others. It will save us both time and money.
- Have an agenda a stick to it!!!! No meeting should last longer than an hour. If it goes past that, the person running the meeting isn’t very good at it.
- Reduce faculty meetings to quarterly intervals and only during professional development days. Spend a half day in PD and the other half in faculty meetings.
- Quit coming up with crap to meet about. In education we sometimes meet in order to decide what to meet about. Just stop! I would guess that 75-80% of what I met about(during my last few years of teaching) didn’t need to be discussed in a meeting.
In conclusion, I wish a school improvement goal would be to reduce faculty meetings by another 75%. Period. We need to focus on writing great lessons, and that should be our primary focus. Not standardized assessments. Not listening to someone pontificate. But writing great lessons to be delivered to students. Time is money, and I want our money directed at great instruction for students. When we meet too often and for too long, we are sending the message that we run an inefficient organization. When we have very few meetings and those meetings are run at a crisp, efficient pace(which is respectful of everyone’s time), we are sending the message that we run a great, finely tuned organization.
Give teachers more time to prepare for instruction and more time to teach, and student capacity for learning will radically increase.
Don’t just work hard. Work Smart. ~ Pat Summitt
Pro Tip: Don’t roll out some graph about how meetings have decreased. Every person in that room knows that truth before someone trots out there for the general public. What you do behind closed doors in public education will be known by the public that you serve. This isn’t some secret society.
