27 Ways To Engage Teachers At Your Next Faculty Meeting

27 Ways To Engage Teachers At Your Next Faculty Meeting

27 Ways To Engage Teachers At Your Next Faculty Meeting

by TeachThought Staff

Engaging teachers at staff meetings matters.

The explanation goes something like this:

Teachers work hard.

While teachers are professionals and professionals often have to perform under less-than-ideal circumstances, all human beings have a finite amount of energy and focus each day.

Teachers are human beings. Therefore, teachers have a finite amount of energy and focus each day.

Staff meetings are often held at the end of the work day—a day that sees said inherently-energy-limited human beings perform an extremely demanding and mentally taxing job.

An underlying assumption of a staff meeting is that important information is going to be presented and explored. This means that teachers are going to interface with critical information at a time when they’re not at their best.

While we’ve long held that technology can be used to reduce the number and length of teacher staff meetings, in many states and districts there are actual requirements for how many hours a week or month teachers must meet and ‘be developed.’

One response has been ‘PD-style’ staff meetings that seeks to kill two birds with one stone. The very least an administrator can do for teachers, it would seem, is to create a staff meeting that is actually useful for teachers that has a clear relationship to student learning.

But there are ways to spice up even the most bane staff meeting, and below infographic creator Mia MacMeekin offers 27 ways to make your next staff meeting more interesting—and engaging—for teachers.

27 Ideas To Engage Teachers At Your Next Faculty Meeting

1. Gamify it

2. Skype or stream

3. Use food

4. Clarify norms and rules that work

5. Do a walk & talk

6. Use QR codes

7. Lose the chairs

8. Source the wisdom of the crowd (the teachers)

9. Be brief

10. Give everyone a voice

11. Flip the meeting

12. Use school-to-school conversations

13. Try a book club

14. Consider ‘gamestorming’

15. Model best practices

16. Itemize and separate issues and priorities

17. Leverage conflict

18. Invite the community in

19. Cut it short

20. Dream

21. Step outside

22. Have different voices lead each time

23. Create a mentoring program

24. Experiment with new technology or thinking

25. Act or role-play

26. Live stream it

27. Use games (team-building games, for example)

For a more colorful, visual arrangement of ways to engage teachers at a school staff meeting, see the full graphic below.

27 Ideas To Engage Teachers At Your Next Faculty Meeting

ways to spice up a faculty meeting