Revisiting the Need for Faculty Meetings
Agendas Might Be Better Served in Alternative Formats
Dec 15, 2008
Few professional conclaves sink to the depths of many school faculty meetings. Often called without an agenda, or an agenda that could have been addressed through emails, the faculty meeting is rapidly become the bane of every teacher. In many cases faculty meetings serve as self-aggrandizement for administrators that use such meetings to reinforce control. Faculty meetings should only be convened when real business needs are to be covered and administrators earnestly seek out collaborate counsel from professional colleagues.
Faculty Meeting Agenda
Faculty meetings should never be used to enunciate “announcements” that can be covered in memoranda or through a general email distribution. Additionally, opening up faculty meetings to general contributions from the faculty not related to specific items under discussion has the effect of soliciting a multitude of “reminders” and calendar events moderated by teachers – all items that have no place in professional meetings. Prolonged faculty meetings waste needless time and energy, particularly with professional educators that do not leave the daily work at the school house door.
Faculty meeting agenda should be limited to issues affecting the entire staff and school community. Every effort should me made to plan a short meeting and, if necessary, limit debate on hotly contested issues. Too often administrators find the need to justify or legitimize faculty meetings and thus prolong needless and redundant discussions. Agendas should be composed with an effort toward efficiency yet too often they reflect disparate and frivolous topics.
Alternatives to Faculty Meetings
In some cases, discussion items might be better handled by departmental meetings or inter-departmental meetings. Some discussion topics might be better served through the creation of short term focus groups or ad hoc committees. If agenda items only concern one aspect or grouping within the school community, smaller meetings can be calendared that address only those specific issues rather than wasting the time of the entire faculty.
Regularly Scheduled Faculty Meetings Lead to Unproductive Sessions
In many schools, faculty meetings are placed on the school calendar at the beginning of the school year. Thus, every teacher will know that the third Wednesday of every month will see a general faculty meeting at a specified time and place. Although planned meetings help teachers with long term scheduling, they feed into the chasm of unproductive time. Administrators feel obligated and compelled to facilitate the meetings, even though there may not be a pressing issue.
It is the above scenario that will result in agendas filled with non-pressing issues. Attempting to pull “a rabbit out of a hat,” administrators will fill the time just for the sake of having satisfied the calendar. Additionally, faculty meetings held in the name of “image” serve no useful purpose but detract from the seriousness of professional collaboration on important school issues.
What Is To Be Done?
Teachers need to let administrators know that their time is valuable and that unfruitful and wasteful meetings do much to harm the general morale of a professional staff. The faculty meeting has become a sacred staple of school operations and may need to be revisited. This may include revising agendas, substituting smaller, more focused meetings for non-universal concerns, and working generally toward a higher degree of administrative efficiency.
