5 Thoughts on Facilitating Better Meetings

One of the items lacking from any of my school administrator preparation courses was how to facilitate an effective meeting, but I've since discovered that we as school leaders facilitate a lot of meetings for a lot of different purposes.

Rare are the days when I'm not facilitating some sort of meeting, and rarely do meetings happen that don't leave me reflecting on how I can do better next time.

When planned right and executed well great meetings can produce important results and generate innovative solutions to persistent problems; the facilitator's role is crucial but also different with each circumstance for meeting. How I prepare will determine if the outcomes match the purpose.

I've learned 5 things about facilitating better meetings this year; please read below.

Prepare like you want your teachers to prepare their classes

• good meetings require the same type of preparation as a good class
• prepare opening remarks beforehand so that you start the meeting off intentionally and don't gobble up too much time up front; use your words to establish the purpose and direction of the meeting
• adapt the principle of backward design to your next meeting
• start with what you want the meeting to produce and plan from there
• base your agenda on your objectives and intended outcomes; use every minute intentionally

NB: using backward design to plan my meetings has yielded great results. The meeting planner template linked above is something I put together adapted from Ubd lesson planning templates.

Facilitate like you want your teachers to facilitate their classes

• post and review the objectives, intended outcomes, and agenda before starting; leave it projected / posted throughout the meeting
• get everybody talking and sharing but always bring it back to the objectives
• settings where a small group listens to the leader talk about something aren't the same thing as meetings
• it can't be your meeting; it has to be everyone's meeting
• just as classes can't be completely teacher-centered, nor can meetings be completely leader-centered
• let them find your conclusions on their own

Communicate for purpose

• don't tell me about the problem; tell me about the solution and actions needed to get there
• don't be afraid to be honest 
• be clear - identify what you need people to hear and do beforehand
• prepare your questions as carefully as you prepare your statements

Identify and follow up on further action items

• establish at the beginning what actions are expected following
• don't make it just about the meeting; what's most important is what happens after the meeting
• meetings that don't produce or lead to anything didn't need to happen
• you'll know how good it was a couple of weeks later after the action items from it are reviewed

Don't get nervous; get prepared

Your response to your own difficulties or problems will go a long way in determining the outcome

— Eddie Evans (@ewevans3) April 22, 2014

• if you're expecting confrontation or hostility, then your best strategy is extra preparation
• visualize yourself responding to certain claims or talking points
• anticipate where the hostility may come from and plan for it
• nervousness is pointless; thinking and dreading is not the same as thinking and preparing
• don't dwell on it, but don't avoid it - be ready for whatever it is
• focus on what you can control; how someone else intends to behave is outside of your power

What's the Opposite of "Shoosh?"

Quiet is nice every once in a while in certain classroom situations, but it's not the environment that promotes long-term memory or transfer. Get them talking to each other about the material. Devote set intervals of time for interpersonal communication and reflection between students, teammates, colleagues, etc about the topic or lesson at hand if you want it to stick and have meaning.

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Quote Source - page 58

"You want to demonstrate the process of talking through a problem so that your students will begin to see how to negotiate challenging situations." -Germeroth & Day-Hess p. 8-9

You want them talking about it now so that they're talking about it when it matters - when it gets hard.

You want them talking about it now so that they're talking about it when you're not there.

Quiet cuts out critical steps to the process of learning anything. 

We talk our way through questions and problems all of the time, because it leads better performances and outcomes. 

Even the most confident of us bounce ideas off of our colleagues and teammates every day; shared decision making and responsibility are two elements on the Massachusetts teacher rubric; we're not supposed to work quietly.

So let's not teach quietly.

Quiet is orderly; it's easier. But don't confuse order and politeness for long-term learning.

"The overarching goal is to help middle and high school students realize that by using effective learning strategies and study habits, they can control their learning and academic success, even when the work is challenging." -Germeroth & Day-Hess p.34

Dialogue and interaction with others leads toward realization. Dialogue and interactions gets us through the tough stuff.

They have to be able to do it or talk about it outside of the classroom or practice for it to matter; it's not uncommon to hear someone lament that they took a class on something but don't remember a thing. 

It was probably a wicked quiet class.

For different ways to get them talking more, I wrote down 11 strategies last month. 

Get them talking about sample pieces of work discussing ways to improve it.

"Students can typically identify problems in other people's writing more easily than they can in their own, but with guidance, they can start applying what they've learned during peer feedback sessions to their own work." - Searle p. 86

Make today's lesson really matter.

Promote engagement; promote activity; promote the long-term learning and application of your lesson; get them talking about it.

#education #classroommanagement

11 Ways To Get Them Talking About It

"...recap is especially helpful for students...who have memory barriers because they tend to forget the purpose of the lessons as they try to apply new skills. Verbalization not only reconnects the dots for them but also strengthens mental pathways for later retrieval." - Margaret Searle, Causes & Cures in the Classroom, p. 58

One of the surest and simplest ways to promote the learning of the lessons we try to teach our students or staff is to get them talking about the content or skills of focus.

Talking it out reorganizes the material or steps inside our own heads so that it makes sense to us.

Talking it out forces us process, apply, and create output as a result of the daily input; what good is input if it's not translated to output?

We need to be mindful of this when we plan and when we design learning opportunities for our students or staff.

We spend so much time planning, preparing, and practicing dynamic and interesting ways to give our people input, but it's how intentional and planned the output is that will determine to what degree what we've taught is actually learned.

Talking our way through new lessons is tried and true; it's a way to make it permanent in our heads without having to stretch our creative capacity; there's no writer's block or foreign skill set required to talk about what I'm learning.

Here are some ways to get them talking about what we're teaching:

1. Stop class or meeting every 10 minutes and have neighbors turn and talk about what was just taught, done, discussed, etc. for 2 minutes
2. When asking questions to the class have each student write their answer on a little white board and hold up their answers. Before revealing the right answer have neighbors discuss why they answered how they did.
3. Have students send you an audio note using the voice recorder app on their phone, or a website like vocaroo.com summarizing what happened in class today, what was taught, and how it will be used tomorrow and beyond
4. Have students prepare audio notes on the topic of the day taking a certain viewpoint. Use edmodo, a common Google doc, itslearning, etc. for students to have a single spot to post all of their audio notes to and use the prepared statements to springboard further more spontaneous candid discussion the next day in class.
5. Have students screencast as they solve a math problem or construct a thesis paragraph using webistes like screencast-o-matic or apps like educreations.
6. When making slides utilize the narration option; oral presentations don't always have to be live. With that being said...
7. ...Get people up and talking about their work in front of a group. Earlier in the school year I presented to 12 different groups of ~100 students over the course of two weeks; by the 11th time I really really knew my stuff.
8. In a history or literature class have the students Face Off. During a Colonial America unit I may partner students off and have one act as a Loyalist and the other as a Patriot; in an economics class I may have one act as Keynes and one as Friedman; in a lesson on the Korean War one would be Truman and the other MacArthur.
9. Establish a classroom routine where at the beginning of every class someone is the "leader," and they recap yesterday's class and ask members of the class content questions to review and generate discussion. Laura Evans establishes routines that get the students talking better than anyone I've ever seen.
10. If you have a website use it to provide an authentic audience for student spoken work.
11. Make an activity pyramid of options for students to respond to input and processes as they read or listen. The linked pyramid calls for written responses, but could easily be tailored.

Getting them talking about it betters the odds it moves from taught to learned.

How else can we get them talking about it?

Lesson #2 - Everything Is An Opportunity to Build or Burn a Bridge

I’ve been reflecting a lot on my first year in school leadership; the second lesson from this year is EVERYTHING IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD OR BURN A BRIDGE.

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Too often we forget that people need to be listened to. It was two months ago that an irate parent was telling me she was putting me on the front page of the newspaper for being terrible at what I do, and it was two hours ago that the same parent was telling me she was thankful for how much help I offered her son throughout the school year. My conduct and professionalism throughout the prior hostile exchange built a bridge; had I focused my attention during that meeting on retorting or debating the parent rather than listening to what the concerns really were I probably would have burned the bridge. Had my behavior and response to the hostility been reciprocal I doubt the second exchange would have happened as it did. Even hostility can move us toward where we’re trying to go. Everything is an opportunity to build a bridge.

Too often we act solely in the short-term; we just want issues to go away. A student was being referred to the office by the same teacher for same type of behavior and poor academics over and over and over again, and I was growing tired of it. So badly I wanted to suspend the student and reprimand the teacher for not managing the classroom well, but what would the long-term impact of that be? So instead I wedged in another appointment in the day, got the teacher coverage for a face to face group meeting, and got everybody together for as long as it took. In the short-term it created a hectic day, and meant that I was spending another hour on an ongoing issue; in the long-term it set the student up for 3 consecutive months of success in a required class following the conference and established for the teacher a network of allies in me and the parents. Everything is an opportunity to build a bridge.

Too often we get too busy to realize how busy others are and how hard the people around us are working. Teachers are doing awesome things in classrooms that can easily go unnoticed if we let them; making time to visit shows appreciation for what they’re doing; appreciation empowers others. Replying to emails matters. Being on time and keeping meetings within the scripted time frame matters. Only have meetings that you’re prepared to hold matters. Everything is an opportunity to build a bridge.

Lesson #1 - Give Them Something to Make

As it comes to a close this week, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my first year in school leadership; the first lesson from this year is groups and committees need something to produce.

Our Principal’s Advisory Council, a group of 8-10 students grades 9-12, designed two meaningful programs this year that should have a long-lasting positive impact. The school’s participation in Project Purple in January and the crafting of a Class of the Month program for this September are both the handiwork of the PAC; their efforts were efficient and high-quality.

Monthly meetings were productive and outcome oriented; we never had one of those awkward sessions where someone was on a rant or nobody has anything to do or talk about. We always had something that needed our attention and cooperation, and we needed all of the limited amount of time we had together.

It was always the committees and meetings where all we did was talk about problems that I dreaded the most. It’s the groups that create solutions and products that people want to be a part again next year; that’s what benefits school communities. When leading committees in the future I ought to apply the lessons learned from leading the PAC this past year.