By Joan Richardson

Tools for Schools, Oct-Nov. 1999

(Editor's Note: The tools that accompany this article are available in the printed version of the newsletter or in Adobe PDF format.)

Almost any teacher or principal would agree that faculty meetings are one of the most dreaded and ineffective parts of the work week.

"Faculty meetings are a wasteland. Teachers make jokes about them. They laugh about how bad they are,’’ says Mike Murphy, NSDC’s director of programs and a former elementary school principal in Texas.

But Murphy also acknowledges that staff meetings represent "a chunk of time that is begging to be used in a productive way.’’

Independent consultant Pam Robbins agrees. "More and more principals are finding themselves asking where they can find time in the traditional day to develop the skills within teachers to help them meet rigorous demands for student accountability.’’

That has led an increasing number of principals to seize the opportunity to transform staff meetings into mini-staff development sessions in which the entire staff reads, discusses, analyzes, and plans together.

In schools where time is a precious and limited commodity, using staff meetings more effectively can be a way to "find time’’ for staff development. In many school districts, teacher contracts already recognize that teachers are obligated to attend staff meetings on a regular basis.

"I don’t discount the importance of staff meetings. I think they can be very valuable. But we’ve kind of dumbed them down. We’ve used them as a 45-minute memo," Murphy says.

Instead, staff meetings can be used as tools for building a learning community among a school’s staff. "Staff meetings are an opportunity to built unity and community. They’re perfect times to physically connect with everyone on the staff to make sure that there is coherence and continuity,’’ Murphy says.

Principals who want to make this change must first determine how to disseminate information that traditionally has been shared in staff meetings.

Murphy says he designated a bulletin board in his elementary school where he posted information that needed to be shared with the staff. Carole Schmidt, a former high school principal, says she delegated to department chairs the responsibility of ensuring that certain kinds of information reached teachers.

As a principal begins to shift from a traditional staff meeting to a staff development meeting, Robbins also recommends that the learning portion of the meeting comes first. Quoting Kent Peterson, she says, "what you pay attention to communicates what you value.’’

Before changing the staff meeting, Robbins says principals must examine the working relationships among the staff. If a staff is not used to working together, she recommends introducing the idea slowly. "You’ll doom your collaborative effort to failure if you use a high-risk activity with a group that’s not ready for it,’’ Robbins says.

When she thinks about schools, Robbins divides them into three categories, depending on their readiness and familiarity with collaboration.

For these schools, Robbins recommends "low-risk’’ staff development meetings initially. For example, the principal can invite staff members to a "swap meet’’ in which teachers exchange books, articles, and classroom materials.

"This gets them used to sharing stuff, even though it’s physical stuff. No one has to put their professional skill and knowledge on the line for scrutiny,’’ she says.

A notch above is a jigsaw reading. For staffs who are unaccustomed to talking together, this will give them an opportunity to read a similar article and have a substantive conversation about it. Such a discussion also begins the process of recognizing the expertise that already exists in the staff, she said.

"Collegiality must be based on congeniality and this begins to develop a basic comfort level with one another,’’ she says.

For such schools, Robbins often recommends an activity she calls "Mail Call.’’ In this activity, teachers can privately identify problems and receive suggestions from colleagues about how to address the issues. Because it’s done privately, teachers are less likely to feel embarrassed about seeking help.

Robbins says such an activity, however, begins to demonstrate to teachers that their colleagues have a great deal of expertise. "They can leave the room with 15, 20, 25 ideas about how to deal with something. It creates an understanding that, if only I reach out to my colleague, perhaps the answer to my problems exists three to four doorways away,’’ she says.

For those schools, Robbins recommends introducing them to techniques for examining student work. Again, she cautions that not all staffs are ready for an activity like this. "Teachers might get a little nervous. This can be very threatening because other teachers are dissecting the actual work that their students are doing and that’s a reflection on their teaching,’’ she says.

A preliminary step might involve having teachers discuss work done by students in other schools. "This way, they learn the strategy and no one teaching in your school feels like they’ve been put on the chopping block,’’ she says.

To make staff meetings meaningful to teachers, Murphy recommends entrusting teachers with the responsibility for selecting the content in relation to student learning goals.

Then, the principal needs to assume responsibility for planning staff meetings. "Treat the meetings the way you would any formal learning experience. Apply the same standards you would apply to any quality professional development,’’ Murphy says.

During one year at his school, for example, teachers decided to they wanted to devote staff meeting time to discipline issues. During a series of faculty meetings, teachers read articles and watched videos of simulations and real-life situations of different discipline issues. Murphy led discussions about what they read and saw. Over time, they generated ideas of what would work in their school.

"Faculty meetings became meetings that people were eager to attend,’’ he says.

As a high school principal, Carole Schmidt did something similar. During her first year as principal, she listened to teachers’ concerns about the scattershot efforts at improvement. "What they wanted was a common focus. We were killing people with all of the committees that we had,’’ she says.

Schmidt decided that the entire staff would spend its four staff development half days plus staff meeting time during the next year rewriting the school’s mission, vision, and establishing learning goals. She also moved from weekly staff meetings to quarterly staff meetings. "Any time we had the faculty together, we focused on learning goals for the school,’’ she says.

"We changed the meeting so it wasn’t just a meeting to get together. It was a meeting designed for their learning and for mine,’’ she says.

Murphy says pulling a staff together to focus on a single theme over a long period helps build a sense of community among the staff. "Teachers have been very isolated from each other. Faculties don’t just naturally come together. But they’re expected to work on common goals and common needs. They can’t do that until schools find ways to bring people together,’’ he says.