School communities have many meetings that are traditional like staff meetings, subject (learning area) meetings, School Board meetings, Annual General meetings and so on. The time taken for meetings is valuable to all present and there is nothing worse than spending 45 minutes or more in a meeting then walking out knowing that it has been a complete waste of time.
I am assuming that Principals know how to organise for and run meetings so as I noted above I am not going into this. The set of meetings that your school has needs to be reviewed as part of the School Development Plan (see previous posts on this blog about the School Development Plan) to ensure that meetings are not overdone. This review should also tap into the effectiveness of the meetings. Any meeting that is not relevant to the learning of the students in some form or another is probably not worth having."
I spent my last couple of career years as the A/Director of Personnel for the Education Department of Western Australia. Today this would be called Human Resources Director. My department had 160 staff whose prime job was to ensure appropriate staffing of all State schools and to ensure that the entitlements of all staff were appropriate, inclusive of paying the fortnightly salaries and accommodation for teachers in rural schools. I had managers to whom I could delegate to ensure that our goals were achieved for each off the various sectors of the State school system. I was lucky to have three superb managers respectively of the Special Ed sector, the Primary school sector and the Secondary school sector.
My department was one of many in the overall Education Department and part of my job was to attend various meetings. My meeting schedule was ridiculous. My experience was that I attended so many poor meetings that were a waste of time that on one occasion (tongue in cheek) I suggested to my PA that she cancel my attendance at half the meetings I normally attended to see what would happen. We never did this, but to this day I suspect my not going to many of these time wasting sessions would have not made one scrap of difference to anything. I felt that if I attended another meeting where we were again entreated to conceptualise this or that I would go mad. It was often so impractical in tone and outcome. I wanted to say to many of those present that at this very moment the kids and their teachers are out in the schools doing what this should be all about. This experience of so many poor meetings has turned me off meetings for life.
Thank goodness school communities are the front line and the meetings are likely to all reflect this. I say again: "Any meeting that is not relevant to the learning of the students in some form or another is probably not worth having."
While this post is not about how meetings should be run I cannot resist saying that any Chair of a meeting who does not create a good listening environment for participants within that meeting had better rethink.
Sorry my tone is a bit bossy, but I felt the need to cut to the chase with this topic.
May the Force be with you!
GD
PS: Forgot to say that meetings that are full of eduspeak and jargon can be a serious pain. Plain language with the use of technical terminology only as needed is the way to go.
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