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How much of your professional time is spent in meetings? According to Psychology Today, 30% of the average professionals day is spent in meetings. If that person works an 8 hour working day, 2.5 hours are spent in meetings (including lunch) reporting, brainstorming, debating, creating action plans and whatever else happens there.
Corporate meetings originally began at the dawn of the industrial era when managers met with workers at the start of the shift to prepare them for the day’s work. Prior to that, corporate deals were done over dinner among families or at parties.
Town hall meetings were common place front he Victorian era onward where people would meet to discuss issues that effected the community.
Of course there was those Greek philosopher guys held some open forums too.
Modern day meetings have negative malaise surrounding them. Everyone who attends usually has something better to be doing and most of the communication at these meetings can be done via technology like Google docs or email.
While meetings are increasingly becoming useless, our need for more human interaction is not. Meetings do offer a way for people – real people – to interact.
Why not change the culture of meetings by having people work instead of listen? Come, talk, gossip, plan brainstorm, but do work. Have a goal. You can’t leave this meeting unless you generate 3 new ideas and have a plan in place to implement them. Meeting should be like team sporting events where we come together work for a common goal. When the game is over we head back and prepare for the next one.
What does your classroom look like? It a place where people come to chat, finish some questions and listen to instructions? Or is it a place where students show up, work with a common goal and create something new, interesting and helps the world?
A very wise teacher (http://www.ovenell-carter.com/) told me this past weekend that in his class, students are learning either with their mouths, their ears, or their feet. They must either be contributing (mouths), listening (ears), or leaving (feet). He believed that if they didn’t want to listen or contribute, they should go elsewhere where they can do one of those two things. They can learn in any way they’d like but they must be learning. I thought that was a neat way of looking at things.
I’m not sure if that example totally fits with your idea, but your question about whether a classroom is one where students come and work toward a common goal made me think of it. How might we work toward that type of classroom instead of the passive, listen-to-instructions type of classroom?
Thanks for making me think.
Jen
Love it @jwood! We have moved to a “Week Ahead” newsletter for all staff to ensure that Monday meetings are generative and productive. That any info that needs to me communicated goes into the “week ahead” and that meetings are used for ideas, decision making, problem solving and the like. Works well.
What do you do at your school?
@gnichols @jsmith @jweening @ddoucet @cschindler
We have a great thing in our meetings where we, first and foremost, check-in with each other. How are you, personally and professionally? It’s a great way to check-in, and make the meeting more productive and useful for all of us 🙂
I love the check-in personally and professionally! We have weekly meetings that are geared around just what you mentioned in your blog and how Justin has outlined his. We’ve moved away from the stand and deliver and we have time for discussion (we had a great one this morning) where we work with people from all over the school. It’s great to see other perspectives and really helps to shift thinking sometimes when you’re discussing with Admissions & Advancement officers as well as teachers.
I think you’re right, a meeting should have a common goal and I don’t love sitting through meetings that simply deliver information that could be communicated more effectively otherwise but I do really like to sit down and challenge each other’s thinking on learning, assessment, school culture and anything involving students.
Looking forward to reading more of your blogs! What can you do about meetings at your school? How can you help shift the style?
I like your comparison of class to a meeting – it’s quite powerful.
When I was at university I did an internship in software project management, and we found that in large companies, many projects were lucky to have a ratio of 50/50 of the % of time spent in meetings vs working (some were much worse!) Amazing.
The idea of meetings being a misuse of time has been a challenge in so many institutions. My schools meeting culture was dramatically transformed when we started using protocols to structure our time together, as guided by the work of NSRF (http://www.nsrfharmony.org/). Game. Changer. When used, I found that the time together created outcomes that couldn’t have been possible otherwise. The worst is when you are in a meeting and thinking “this could just be shared through an email”…I never found that when we used a protocol.