Five Deadly Staff Meeting Sins and How to Avoid Them

August 16th, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Organizational Effectiveness

When I was teaching, I used to say, “May I die during a staff meeting. The transition between life and death would be so subtle.”

It’s kind of snarky, but I’m sure you’ve sat through staff meetings where you were guilty of watching the clock, grading papers, doodling, or making lists.

It’s the beginning of another school year and I bet you have at least a half day full of staff meetings – maybe several days. Man, that’s rough. What makes these days so painful and what takeaways do we have for our own teaching?

Staff Meeting Sin #1: We have better things to do.

At the meeting: It’s tough to hold a staff meeting when every teacher is drumming her fingers, looking at her watch, and making lists of things she really needs to be doing in her classroom. The teachers may be assembled in the Library Media Center, but their minds are on the new textbooks, putting up bulletin boards, and making sure they have all their photo copies. You don’t have them at hello, you have them at goodbye.

In the classroom: Sometimes it’s the same with our students. Ever try to give an important lecture the day of the Homecoming pep rally? Your whole class is wearing school colors and some are painted blue and white. This is not the day to lecture about the causes of World War II. You might as well harness all that fidgety energy in a meaningful way. I used to take my classes outside on Homecoming Friday to introduce the concept of stage fight choreography for my drama unit. Every calendar year contains a few of these crazy days: yearbook club photo day, the day before winter/spring break, the day before the state tournament, and the day before prom/Homecoming.

You could spend your life frustrated with the evils of modern high school education or you could put some mind power to harnessing your student’s energy for good – and have a little fun, too. Good suggestions for this are: educational review game that involves movement, a live demonstration of a physics concept, a live, participatory model of a math concept, a battle reenactment, or improvisational skits that fit a classroom objective. Get the students out of their seats, on their feet, and learning something novel to keep them from watching the clock, fidgeting, and not concentrating at all.

Staff Meeting Sin #2: No sense of time

At the meeting: I’ve been in staff meetings where I swear the clock’s hands have been moving backwards. I’d had too much coffee and there’s no restroom break in sight. My fellow teachers at my table were engaged and listening at the beginning of the meeting, but with no end in sight, they’ve started writing letters and making lists.

In the classroom: I have this really great lecture about Shakespeare, his life, the Globe, and the origins of his plays. Well, I think it’s great. Some of my students, though, think it’s way too long. They don’t care about Edward de Vere and the authorship question at all – can you imagine?

To stop my students from fidgeting when I talk about groundlings, I limit my lecture time to just 15 minutes and I assign a clock watcher to give me the three-minute signal, the one-minute signal, and the 10-second countdown. Of course, I schedule several 15-minute lessons over the course of a week so my freshmen can learn about the Elizabethan world view and the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet.

Staff Meeting Sin #3: Purposeless work

At the meeting: I’ve attended faculty meetings where the teachers form small groups and pore over student data. Then we complete a spreadsheet about the data. But, what does this have to do with how I’ll teach poetry? No idea.
When we finished, the administrator gathered up our work and our data and put it all in a box. Eighty people spent two hours filling out spreadsheets about that student data and I had the impression that no one would review our work. Since we didn’t report out to the group, I didn’t know what the results and conclusions were in the other groups, either. I felt like we’d all been used to satisfy some district requirement and that our work would stay in that box and live on a store room shelf. I left the meeting feeling unappreciated and empty.

In the classroom: Students really hate assignments that are just a check in the box, too. They don’t want to spend their time at home writing paragraphs you’ll never read or answering questions you’ll never discuss.

I know it’s not always possible to make homework fun. Sometimes homework is work. However, here are a few ideas I’ve used that work well to make it more interesting, at least.

Bring in an object from home that would have helped the story’s main character. Be prepared to explain why the object would be useful and how it would have changed the story’s resolution.

• Interview your parent to discover his or her opinion or experiences with the class’s topic.
• Locate an example of an indirect quote in the newspaper and be prepared to explain why the writer might have chosen to use an indirect quote instead of a direct quote.
• Create a joke and a punch line based on what we learned in class. (clean)
• What would this battle’s theme song be? (current radio hits, clean)
• What do you think the most important detail of this reading is and why?
• What might a Twitter exchange between these two scientists look like?

Staff Meeting Sin #4: No time for discussion or sharing

At the meeting:  I’ve joined my peers in the Library Media Center to listen to our principal talk about how no one follows the tardy policy. Then, in small groups, we discuss the tardy policy, its merits and flaws, and we discuss how to better enforce it and make sure everyone’s on the same page. But these great conversations go nowhere. No one records them, no one reports out to the group. Eighty smart people come up with great strategies, but there’s no change to the tardy policy and no change in enforcement.

In the classroom: Even if there’s very little time for discussion, your students love to hear what one another thinks. Here are some quick ways to share:

• As students enter the room, ask them to write one thing they learned from the previous night’s assignment. Keep the list for the unit review.
• As students exit the room, ask them to write down the biggest take away from class that day. Compile all answers and post on the interactive whiteboard for students to see as they enter. Keep the list for the unit review.
• Think. Pair. Share. It’s an oldie, but a goodie. Give students think time, pair them up, give them a minute to share ideas and pick the best one, then one person from each pair shares with the class.
• Work movement into the discussion. Ask students to line up along the wall. Move to the right if you agree with this statement and move to the left if you disagree. Allow the groups to have a minute to discuss and then request volunteers to defend their positions. It’s a good way to get kids out of their seats in a constructive way.

Staff Meeting Sin #5: No point

At the meeting: Your district administrator decides to start off the year with a metaphor for his vision of the school district. Every teacher sits in the auditorium to watch a clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey and sing a song together. The lights come back on and people look puzzled and are shaking their heads. At least I can go work in my room now, you think.

In the classroom: You have a great hands-on lesson where students toss a ball of string to one another and answer questions while they do it. The whole classroom and all of the students finish the exercise entwined in string. Once the students have cleaned up the mess and gathered up their things, the bell rings. As the students leave, you hear one kid say: what was that about? Someone responds: I’m not sure, but at least we don’t have homework.

Sometimes the objective gets lost in the activity, doesn’t it? I once had students build a scale model of the Globe Theatre. They were beautiful Popsicle stick sculptures, but pretty pointless. What did my students learn? Well, they learned about what theater looked like in Shakespeare’s day and they took a huge amount of time doing it.

Even though I kept one of those Globe Theatre models on top of my classroom closet, it was more a reminder for me to be sure that I met objectives than an objet d’art. I made sure from that point on that everything my students did met objectives and that all evaluations stemmed from those objectives. Sure, those models were amazing, but they weren’t a good use of my students’ time. I want my kids to leave the classroom saying I learned something rather than What was that about?

How about you? You’ve sat through faculty meetings. What can you learn from the meeting that bored you to tears? How can you avoid that mistake in your own classroom?