Faculty Meetings Reconstructed

Earlier this week, Peter DeWitt posted about faculty meetings and the need for administrators to make sure teachers have a voice in them. Peter's posts always cause great reflection for me and this one was no different.  In part, he wrote:

Many leaders do not encourage teacher voice in their faculty meetings, and then they complain all that they hear from teachers during faculty meetings are complaints. 

When I read the post earlier this week, I was feeling pretty comfortable that our faculty meetings were better than faculty meetings of the past. We end each meeting with a smackdown and those have really brought the focus of our conversations back to teaching and learning. 

As final touches were put on our agenda for this month, I was feeling pretty confident about the meeting. Yet, I seriously underestimated how amazing it would be. (Who says that about a meeting?!) 

We opened the meeting talking about making calls home. Good calls are easy to make. It's the tougher calls that need more thought.  Teachers shared tips on key phrases they use and we learned from each other. They either posted their key phrases to a padlet link or wrote them on a post it note. My job now is to take all of those key phrases and compile them for staff reference.

The next part of our meeting involved our newly appointed STLE grant Teacher Leaders showing the Video Professional Development page from Engage NY.  They attended a recent training with Mike DeCaprio, Lead Coordinator for BOCES. He helped model a process to use the videos to help work with groups of teachers to reflect upon our practice and current implementation around some parts of the Common Core Standards. I stood to the side and let these two teachers lead their colleagues through looking for shifts 2 and 4 from the ELA standards. Teachers then held conversations with each other about what they saw. In under 15 minutes, we had a new understanding of what the shifts would look like outside of ELA class. It was powerful to watch.  This exercise will be a standing activity we perform at each faculty meeting using different PD videos and modeling different protocols for consideration. 

So those two items would have been enough. But, we kept going.

I was giddy all day knowing I had a surprise message from Dave Burgess for my staff to hear. Each of the teachers in my building were given a copy of Teach Like a Pirate last summer. Many committed to reading the entire book although I had requested at least the "hooks" section of the book to be read. In September, I wrote about the "hooks" from the book and our faculty review of them. November seemed like a perfect time to revisit the conversation. Dave's message was outrageous, inspirational, thought provoking and PERFECT. He challenged our thinking. He reminded us to think about how we would want students to describe our classrooms. He skillfully reminded us that connecting with kids was always more important than content.  Although he could not hear us (it was a recorded message), we laughed with him. We grew silent at the serious points he made. We joined in applause at the end of his message because he said what we needed to hear. 

So those three items, that should be enough. But, not for the team I get to lead. We kept going.

Three teachers were on deck with their instructional strategy (smackdown) to share. Teacher #1 shared a cubby he uses on each table for all supplies. In that bin, any tool a kid might need in his class is handy. It even includes extra pencils. The bin reduces the time lost looking for tools or an extra pencil. It was a great reminder about the importance of organization! Teacher #2 boldly showcased some of her flipped lectures to the group. She's using brainshark to deliver content to students online so that when they arrive to school, they have more time for the application work connected to the content. She had some great dos and don'ts from her experience this year. Teacher #3 shared the GRASP strategy with the group. Working through that strategy was a gentle reminder about the need to set a purpose for learning. We canvassed the group after his presentation and no one admitted to knowing his strategy before today.

Our meetings always end with good of the order and loose ends. The only concern raised was about our late buses. A teacher had asked me to check on the actual departure time for the buses. She explained that students were having to wait between 10 and 20 minutes beyond the time designated for late buses.  She wasn't upset about the buses running late. In fact, she shared (and some of my other after school teachers nodded in agreement):

"If the buses are going to be coming at a later time, that means I can keep teaching longer. Just let me know."

THAT'S the kind of team I work with.

In Peter's post about faculty meetings, he also wrote:

"Collaboration is key, and the faculty meeting can be the place to share those ideas. Faculty meetings should be places where staff can dissect, debate and discuss learning, teaching and curriculum. And it is the leader's job to provide that environment." 

It may be my job to provide the environment but none of what I saw today was me. This meeting was about bite sized pd for teachers and a chance to come together to recommit to our passion for teaching and learning.

And that's exactly what we did.