Meeting to Meet
I know this will come as a huge shock, but most people despise meetings. When I ask staff about things that are holding them back, almost to a person they have said, “Too many meetings.”
When it comes right down to it, though, these are rituals that are deeply ingrained in the culture of our school. Most schools have a similar situation.
Long, low-energy meetings tend to distract and mute the day. – Martin Fowler
The trouble with throwing out meetings completely is that they do have some value. According to a few papers summarized here, meetings can help achieve the following:
- Shared commitment
- Communicate daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers
- Identify obstacles so that the team can take steps to remove them
- Set direction and focus
- Build a team
Being a new leader and getting to know my staff, I’m not willing to cut out all meetings. But what I am committed to doing is making sure that every minute we spend in some kind of meeting serves to move forward the school’s mission and agenda.
Zero-Based Meeting Budgeting
We’re going to get back to basics. At the first regular, monthly meeting of our leadership team, we will remove every meeting from our calendars and begin adding back in those meetings that make sense and will move us toward our goals. We will no longer meet four times per month if we can accomplish the same objective in two highly-productive, focused meetings.
Less meeting time focused on dissemination of information
Since my first day on the job, I’ve made some changes that I hope will whittle down the sheer volume of meeting time. Depending on the sensitivity, items that are “information only” in nature go into an email to team leaders or onto our school blog or wiki. Weening people off email has gone well so far, in no small part thanks to my very flexible group of teacher leaders who have been willing to jump into some new ways of doing business.
Two things I’ve learned in trying to bring this level of change to the day-to-day business of an organization are (1) stop trying to use the “inducement” approach to improving processes and systems (see letter B of Scott’s post on RSS for PD), and (2) stop asking questions like “Do you use Google Docs?” in favor of questions like, “To which email address should I send the invite for this document we’re working on?” It’s all about positive presuppositions. Of course we’re using Google Docs! I mean, who isn’t?
I’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s a start! Look for an upcoming post with more detail on the process of paper-reduction in a 40-year-old middle school.
Interesting reads I plan to share with the team:
Rereading Rework
Tomorrow is the first time I’ll speak (officially, formally) to the entire staff at my school as their principal. I’ve been thinking and stressing a lot over the last week about how that might go. Then I picked up Rework, which was one of the books I read this summer, and found a passage I’d highlighted a few days before I was asked to be a principal:
Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real. It’s why we like real flowers that wilt, not perfect plastic ones that never change. Don’t worry about how you’re supposed to sound and how you’re supposed to act. Show the world what you’re really like, warts and all.
So talk like you really talk. Reveal things that others are unwilling to discuss. Be upfront about your shortcomings. Show the latest version of what you’re working on, even if you’re not done yet. It’s OK if it’s not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.
What we do; What we think
Being a newly appointed principal has provided me with a short window of time during which I am doing a sort of “ethnography” of the school and culture. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my goals these first few weeks has been to try to gather an understanding of what staff is most proud of and what they’d like to see abandoned or, at least, reconsidered.
Like some other schools with diverse student populations, our students need a variety of supports – both academic and personal – to achieve “proficiency” on state tests. While I’m not a fan of this kind of assessment of our kids or our schools, as a new principal I believe that arguing about the merits of said tests is best left to the policy wonks. It’s the hand we’re dealt for now, and as a new principal I’m focusing first on those things within my control.
So my main objective in the near-term is to support my teachers in wrapping their heads around the idea that student success as measured on our state standardized tests and student success as measured by their ability to communicate, collaborate, and produce content in an interconnected, global community are not mutually exclusive.
When I first landed in the Big Chair, I ramped up my scouring of the blogs of other school leaders. What I found was an abundance of ideas, lists of tools and apps, advice on being a good Tweeter, and the like. I’m certainly guilty of posts like this…
What I’ve become increasingly focused on is moving from ideas and feel-good blog posts to action. One of my goals is to renew my use of this space and to spend time writing and reflecting about my actions in this first year as principal. I want to look at things that I actually do as a new principal that might improve systems, culture, and learning in my school with the goal of cultivating an environment that empowers students to learn and develop their identities as global citizens and world-class learners.
I’ll probably fall on my face. I might do that more than once. But at least I’ll try to maintain a good record of my thoughts and actions and how they play out in this organization. Maybe they’ll even help someone else who is entrusted with the exciting but very real responsibility of being a principal.
Some topics I will be addressing in upcoming posts:
- Re-imagining a culture of meetings
- Developing a manageable system of academic interventions that address students’ individual needs
- Moving a 40-year-old school into the 21st century
- Paring back “initiative bloat”
- Doing my best not to reinforce the status quo
- Quite frankly, anything else that comes to mind…
So stick around. This could get interesting.
Blogging for District Leaders
I had my first meeting yesterday with my new boss, the Director of Secondary Education. She is the person whom I replaced as principal at my new school so we are both new to our respective positions.
She spent some time asking me about my vision for my school, but also asked for input on a few things. For instance, she wanted to know what I thought would be the best use of our monthly “levels meetings.” During these times, all the elementary principals, middle school principals, and high school principals get together with their colleagues. As a new principal, this time is going to be invaluable for me to learn from my colleagues at the other middle schools. My suggestion was that as much of the levels meeting time as possible be spent on sharing best practices, collaborating, and learning from each other. Administrivia, or the unidirectional flow of information items that could be handled via email or a memo should not eat into this valuable time that we will have out of our buildings once per month.
I was also very flattered that she asked me about blogging, and about how the Director of Secondary Education might make use of a blog. Like others I have worked with, she is an “article sender.” I’m certain most educational organizations have a person or persons who will send an email or two a week with some “suggested reading” attached or linked. I shared with her that with the high volume of email that I and other principals receive, it’s not unusual for something that isn’t an “emergency” to get overlooked for a day or two. Further, I don’t really care for email attachments as I think they’re an extremely inefficient way to pass along information.
One other assumption in the article-emailing model is that the information is getting to all of the people who need or are interested in it. This involves managing multiple email lists: one for high school principals, one for middle school principals, one for assistant principals… The list goes on. No matter how carefully you curate the lists, someone who wanted the information will be left out, and someone who doesn’t want it will have to either file it away forever because they think they might be asked about it someday, or (gasp!) delete it.
Even if the sole purpose for creating a Director of Secondary Education blog was to share articles and links, this would be a significant benefit to the folks at the buildings. My preferred way of receiving news is via Reeder on my iPad or Google Reader on my MacBook Pro. From there, I’ll often route longer readings to Instapaper so I can focus on them when I have the time.
Further, a blog would bring leaders and prospective leaders in as opposed to an email that is pushed out. I usually have one or two administrative interns who work with me and, despite my best intentions, I don’t always remember to pass along the articles and links that come my way. A blog would be a great forum to bring these up-and-coming leaders into the “fold” and increase their awareness of what is being discussed at the District and principal level.
Finally, with the ability to comment on blog posts, I could see a blog becoming a better place for discussion than the endless CC loops that email encourages and that, for better or worse, eventually get ignored or archived so I can come back later which I rarely remember to do.
It will definitely take some re-norming with principals, but I think given the success of June’s Leadership Bootcamp we are in a great position to start leveraging some more of these one-to-many means of communicating.
Overall, we had what I think was a very productive meeting and I’m excited to work with my new Director in the coming year. Plus, anyone who shows up in my office bearing breakfast burritos and Loveland Coffee knows how to set the tone for a great year!
Getting Down to Business
I started work on Monday at my new job in a new school. It’s the first time that I will be the principal. Going into my first week, I’ve given a lot of thought to my “entry plan” and the overarching areas I will need to address. It’s easy to get bogged down in minutia so I am trying to keep things “big picture” right now and focus on 3 primary areas.
- Relationships with faculty and staff
- Relationships with community
- Learning the school
Being appointed as principal (as opposed to going through a lengthy interview process) presents a unique situation. Being appointed as principal in the summer when the teachers are already on break presents still more uniqueness. It’s a challenge to begin building relationships when no one is physically present.
To start things off on a positive note, one of the first things I did after the official announcement was made was to send an introductory email to the staff. I’ve seen some graduate programs in ed leadership that make prospective principals write “introductory memos,” but I didn’t want to be so formal. I kept it light, shared how excited I was to be joining the staff, gave a little bit of my professional and personal background, and then wished them a great summer.
Finally, I invited them to call or email me and set up a time to talk in a semi-structured setting. When we chat, I am looking for three things: what they are most proud of at the school, what they think needs work, and what they expect from their new principal. I’ve already met with a few staff members and hope to meet with many more before we officially get together in August.
Beyond the school, relationship-building with the parents and community will begin with a redesign and modernization of our school’s webpage. Once “live,” the web page will include a “Principal’s Message” in which I will share much of the same information I shared with the staff about who I am and how I got here. Among other things, I am striving to soothe any anxiety about the change in leadership at the school and communicate that I am kid-focused and committed to maintaining the school as a source of pride for students, parents, and the neighborhood.
Learning the school is far more personal. It begins in the conversations with staff, but also includes a review of relevant documents, including accountability reports, test data, parent/teacher/student climate and culture survey data, and any written history I can find. I have been very fortunate that my “ethnography” has yielded a wealth of information on the school’s namesake, Conrad Ball, and the history of the building since its construction was approved by the Board in 1969.
A visual ethnography of the campus can yield data about the hidden or unspoken culture of the school. What messages are the walls and classrooms communicating that the adults may not even be aware of? There’s a small window of time, during which I am still a newcomer to this culture, where I can observe it as an outsider before becoming part of the fabric.
It’s hard to believe that some of us are back to work already, but I am doing my part to ensure a smooth start to 2010-2011 at my new school.
