TM4T Using Your System 3.2.5 - Admin Work: Meetings

A Personal Opinion

There are few things more puzzling in the world of education than teachers' attitudes to meetings.

If you enter teaching after working in business, you are likely to find teachers' attitudes very strange indeed. For those readers who are not teachers, I should explain that there are rules and limits which determine how many meetings a teacher is expected to attend. One hour a week is the norm.

I think that figure is ludicrously low and I would encourage you to think likewise. A few years ago I met an intelligent colleague who epitomised the sheer illogic of the current rules. She was angry that her school was “making” her attend a 30-minute meeting on the new curriculum. She asked for my advice: should she complain to her head of department first, or go straight to the Union?

I tried to explain to her that her school did not make the decision to introduce a new curriculum, and that it was going to happen whether she liked it or not, and that she actually did need to know what was going on and what was going to happen. In her position, I would be demanding a meeting to find out what I would be expected to do, how it would affect my workload, and to make my thoughts clear on what was and wasn't possible.

Of course meetings rarely work well if people are 'made' to attend, but most of the meetings held in school should really be for the benefit of the attendees, and a most of the resistance is quite illogical.

The fact is that many teachers regard meetings as time-wasters, disrupting their schedules and adding little value to their lives. In most schools, there are in fact limits to the number of meetings that teachers can be made to attend, and this number is so low as to astonish people who work in business.

In fact, of course, meetings can be great time-savers, if they are planned well, chaired well, and everyone knows the rules well. The rules of good meetings are so widely available that I hesitate to repeat them here, but they are so important that it is impossible to omit. They are listed here

Meetings are only effective if the paperwork is produced in a timely and time-efficient manner. The key to producing the paper work is re-use.

There are three documents needed:

- a notice of meeting (at least a week before the meeting)

- an agenda (at least a day before the meeting)

- minutes (at most a day after the meeting – ideally within two hours)