A Meeting Without Food is an Email
Introduction
After observing countless meetings as both a teacher and administrator, I have found that many in the world of education frankly waste their time in unproductive meetings. During an all-staff meeting, many would lament that “this [meeting] should have been an email,” as the common saying goes. Drawing from both experience and scholarship, I have found that effective meetings keep several concerns at the forefront: the students above all else, the needs of those from minoritized backgrounds, and the respect for people’s time and attention. Thus, I have designed this list of criteria for effective meetings. These components, which are by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, help me distinguish what makes an effective meeting different from an email shared aloud.
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Ideally, all meetings within a school should focus on the students.
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Effective meetings honor the needs of people in the room and center the needs of minoritized people.
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As often as possible, nourish meeting attendees.
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When planning meetings, begin with the end in mind.
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People should leave a meeting clear on next steps and goals between this meeting and the next one.

Field Observations: Meetings in Action
Administrative Team Meeting
Held weekly for an hour on Wednesdays, members of the senior leadership team congregate to hash out the issues du jour and brainstorm solutions to problems brought to the literal and proverbial table. Tiffany, in her role as Executive Assistant to the Head of School, emails the team on Monday, notifying them to update the agenda—a running Google Doc—with any announcements, topics, or agenda items no later than Wednesday. On Wednesday, Jon tweaks the agenda to fit his style, including, but not limited to, extra spaces between bullet points, as well as formatting fonts accordingly to include the who, what, when, and how of certain action items. During the meeting, Hilary, the most veteran member of the team and second-most seasoned employee at the school, takes notes.
The meeting begins with general chit-chat, until Jon brings the meeting to order and commences with a warm-up activity, led by a member of the team. The warm-up is, in essence, an icebreaker, meant to build camaraderie within this group. Jon attempts to keep it to a tight five minutes, but it never pans out that way, taking anywhere between 10 and 15 minutes to complete. Given that 13 individuals comprise the Admin Team, that leaves less than 30 seconds to make a thoughtful contribution. Factor in the time to frame the warm-up activity, and that leaves us with less than 20 seconds to speak up. During this meeting, we spent 15 minutes discussing “the TV or Movie Villain that [we] secretly (or not so secretly) loved to hate.” Some colleagues spent up to 2–3 minutes discussing a particular villain, while others troubled the logic of the question and said that they preferred anti-heroes instead, since labeling someone as a villain stripped them of their humanity and complexity.
Following the warm-up, we move into appreciations and announcements, which Jon feels is essential to fostering a climate of cooperation and trust amongst the team. Admin team members typically send their announcements in advance, notifying the team of any pertinent updates to them or their division, such as a planned absence, a request for support on an event, or a brief update on a previous action item. The appreciations are typically announced live, with people extending gratitude to colleagues both in the room and beyond for their help on a project or for their presence. For this meeting, many of us expressed gratitude for the infant program, as the “babies bring us joy” when we need it.
By the time these announcements end, we find ourselves roughly one-third through the hour, with approximately 40 minutes to turn to the agenda of the day. However, during this meeting, we spend another 10–15 minutes on updates, including weather and health, safety, and security. Hilary reports on the upcoming forecast, noting what contingencies we would have in place should we face a snowstorm. Jon then asks members of the team to consult their respective weather apps to see if any discrepancies existed between apps. Following this, he turns our attention to a table he generated to help solidify the communications action plan in case we needed to close school the Tuesday after the long weekend and in turn move MUS student-family-teacher conferences to an all-virtual format. The table lists the individuals historically designated to make these decisions, as well as another column that asks, “Who are the best people to do this moving forward?”
Interestingly, this table re-emphasizes a problem I have noticed at Barrie since my hiring: an emphasis on person-specific roles rather than position-specific. For instance, Hilary initiates the pre-planning for any snow contingencies, with John, our Director of Admission, offering backup and support as needed. Because Barrie follows Montgomery County in making decisions to close, and because the county is notorious for being one of the last counties to make their decision, faculty and staff do not find out about a school closure until sometimes 5am on the day school closes. Additionally, on this table, Jon tasks three individuals with sending a message to all faculty and staff prior to the school making its formal announcement, out of respect for the teachers and to loop them in: himself, Hilary, or Ah-Young—but not in any specified order. Per Joe Brereton, some clearer direction on next steps, in the form of questions, would be helpful: “Who will do what by when? Who will communicate to whom?” (2023, Slide 17). Jon ambitiously seeks to answer those questions in his table, but not as strongly as he intended. I can anticipate Hilary, Jon, and Ah-Young texting or calling each other late in the evening when the announcement is made. All told, I am surprised that all communications are not coming from Jon or even from Kitty, our Director of Communications. Jon’s goal of distributing leadership and responsibility to the group, while noble, can end up confusing people. More importantly, I am aghast that we are revisiting a school closure policy as a team, for something like this should have been established from the start and disseminated amongst senior leadership from the start.
We are now about halfway through the meeting, and we have only addressed one major item of new business. The next 5 minutes feature us looking at yet another table, which lists upcoming events on campus in the next few weeks, as well as the logistical needs for each one. We all take a cursory glance at each event, while Jon asks the personnel chiefly responsible for the events if they have any important adjustments to make or if they need other kinds of support leading up to the event.
Following that, we move into yet another announcement, this time about renewing employee contracts. Jon reviews with everyone the process for approving faculty raises, the timeline and respective deadlines for contract issuance and submission, and when we would begin our hiring process in earnest. At this point, I notice that Jon has been taking the helm on practically every matter, including agenda items that are labeled with someone else’s name. The chair of a meeting—in this case, Jon—is “the steward of the goals,” per Brereton; as a result, Jon should “keep…the meeting focused on the goal” (2023, Slide 15). Discussion does not focus on a “though-provoking question, a quote, etc.,” but really concretizing plans and ironing out details. The goal of this admin team meeting, as with a lot of them, is managing the details and logistics of events and expressing gratitude towards one another, with the occasional opportunity for strategic thinking.
We finally move to a topic for discussion. In this case, I lead a brief brainstorming conversation on hiring practices, as a way to dovetail on the subject of sending faculty and staff contracts out to our colleagues. Jon volunteers to be the scribe, noting the observations that people are making, while I do the same in my notebook. At present, Barrie does not have a formal system of hiring, including, but not limited to, the job descriptions, hiring committees, and the interview stages. The discussion focuses on two essential questions: “What are the things that we do well as far as our hiring process goes, including the recruitment and the interview process?” and “What do we aspire to accomplish as far as promoting a more equitable and inclusive hiring process, especially with respect to hiring for the 2024–25 school year?”
Midway during this facilitated brainstorming—about 6 minutes into a 12-minute discussion originally slated for 20—Jon signals to me that at some point, we should move on to discuss the interview process, but I tell him that we are generating solid ideas and should spend more on the matter at hand: examining what processes we have in place for writing job descriptions that we deem effective. The conversation ends with a few action steps that I would take moving forward, as well as what Heads—the most senior leadership (Division Heads, the Director of Finance and Operations, the Director of DEI, and the Head of School)—would consider as we move towards rethinking our hiring protocols. The meeting finally ends with Jon thanking everyone for the time and for a few people to linger back for follow-up conversations.
I would argue that the issues of administrative team meetings reflect some of the larger concerns about school culture at Barrie as a whole. The meetings seem ambitious without much emphasis on articulating what the purpose of these meetings, and time seems to be spent prioritizing announcements and appreciations—a noble, but frankly meager attempt to build collegiality amongst members of the leadership team. That approximately two-thirds of the meeting was spent providing updates on a contemporaneous topic such as weather or respiratory illnesses—which go hand-in-hand during winter—does not mark to me a serious attempt to build leadership capacity or attack larger, more strategic concerns that face an independent school. Discerning a goal for the meeting is difficult because none is mentioned upfront: Jon simply dives into the warm-up activity, a typical icebreaker, for a team that has worked with one another for six months now. Instead of an icebreaker, perhaps Jon could have spent 10 minutes asking members of the team for a quick highlight of the week, be it a personal or professional one, and holding individuals accountable for keeping to a 30-second window to share.
Additionally, rather than risk becoming a 20-minute block of time, announcements and appreciations should feature quick updates from each member of the team about the goings-on of their week. For instance, Dan Hayden, our Director of Camp and Extended Day, could notify the team about the number of registrations that he had input over the past few days to highlight the high level of interest in the program; he might also signal the need for a future conversation on automating processes so that he and perhaps our Director of Admission can think through ways to save time, money, and energy and direct their attention to other matters. While it is important for a team to express gratitude and appreciation for one another as they work together, it is also as important for them to “rumble” with one another, to borrow language from Brené Brown (2018, p. 10). Per Brown, “rumbling,” helps create a space in which people can “lean into vulnerability, …stay curious and generous, …stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving, … take a break and circle back when necessary, …be fearless in owning our parts, and…listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard” (p. 10).
In general, I feel that admin. team meetings can spend more time wrestling with larger questions about where the school is at present and where it could go in the future. Jon always talks about how “less is more,” but the admin team meetings—along with Heads meetings—become filled with minutiae that often interfere with our ability to focus on large, structural matters at the institution. Furthermore, while I applaud Jon for making agendas a collaborative enterprise, meetings do not feel like they have an end in mind; instead, we rustle up a seemingly slapdash series of topics that may seem disparate. As a result, rather than solve problems, we as administrators tend to cheerlead, not taking any relevant or important courses of action to tackle the challenges facing our institution. At times, Jon or others might reiterate the importance of handling a problem as something that impacts the students entrusted to our care, but I often feel like the connection is tangential at best. Matters that require a community lift or decision are ad hoc, and rarely does everyone seem equipped to handle the task; as a result, Jon ends up making the final call.
Of course, Jon’s departure from Barrie opens up an incredible opportunity to rethink how meetings operate and what they can accomplish. However, until that point, meetings will likely remain, in my mind, fruitless.
Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO) Meeting
After a few minutes of mingling and eating, followed by technical difficulties in setting up a panoramic camera for attendees meeting by Zoom, the meeting officially begins with Tiffany breaking from her position at her seat on the periphery of the classroom to stand in front of the room. She thanks everyone for coming and to grab some dinner—seconds if people feel inclined. Several parents and caregivers show up late. In their apology, they note that they had originally thought the meeting was taking place in the Lower School art room up the hill, for no signage on campus indicated that the meeting was in the Learning Studio down the hill. Immediately thereafter, parents and caregivers begin to recommend that the school do a so-called “better” job of posting reminders and signs for the various meetings occurring on campus—not merely for the PTO meetings, but all of them.
Shortly thereafter, Tiffany opens the floor for announcements and appreciations. Marion shares some information about contributing to the annual fund, as well as recruiting individuals to be volunteers for the annual benefit, as well as a new pre-auction party known as “Wine and Whiskey.” In disseminating the information about the annual fund, Marion opens the floor for questions, at which point many adults in the room ask about the importance of the annual fund and why such a pool of money needs to exist, given the price tag for attending Barrie.
This is not the first time Marion has had to field these kinds of inquiries from the floor; she experienced the same at the first PTO meeting held earlier this school year, trying to skirt these kinds of inquiries. However, she was unsuccessful and needed to rely on the wisdom of a long-time Barrie parent to offer a thorough breakdown of what an annual fund can do and how that differs from something like tuition. Essentially, families who are present during each meeting need a reminder of how independent schools and nonprofit organizations work financially. At present, that is not the case. Granted, this is an institutional matter, but the meeting serves as a microcosm of the larger whole.
In the middle of the cross-talk, a Barrie parent, who also serves as a faculty member, speaks up. Learning Specialist Rachel Tate shares that the annual fund helps support her and others in reaching and teaching students with learning differences and disabilities throughout the school, but especially in the Middle and Upper School. She then points out the inaccurate statistic that 1 in 3 students need some support from her and the other learning specialists on campus. She notes the importance of highlighting the fact that Barrie serves these students, and it could do better to broadcast itself as a school that serves “students with special needs.” I interject, noting the dangers of advertising Barrie as a school serving this population, as we are not a so-called “alternative school”; instead, families should turn to schools like Langley, McLean, or Siena: three institutions that note in their mission statements and philosophies that the school serves students with learning disabilities or differences.
The meeting moves on to discuss increasing family engagement with Barrie, and it goes further off-script as a result. One of the co-chairs of the Parent Teacher Organization, Jenna, notes how families “need to make time” for the PTO, seemingly criticizing families for their lack of interest in serving the institution. Michelle, a parent, notes how privileged the statement is, as Barrie serves many families who have two working adults with little means to hire a babysitter. Tiffany mentions that Zoom is available for parents to join remotely, though remains despondent as to why attendance is so low despite every accommodation made to bring them in.
Looking back at this meeting, I would classify it as ineffective. It seemed to have no agenda, and it ended up devolving into disorderliness quickly as a result. Indeed, we fed attendees, and, apparently, a few notes were shared in advance amongst PTO Co-Chairs and Tiffany as to what the foci of the meeting would be. However, the demands of the crowd led the meeting to transform into what I would describe as a mess. In fact, not long after this conversation, John Wilson, Director of Admission, invited Jon, Tiffany, Marion, and me to discuss why this inaccurate statistic about Barrie was thrown around almost carelessly within the meeting.
As with the administrative team meeting, the PTO meeting needed to begin with the end in mind: What did Tiffany and the Co-Chairs want to get out of the time together with families, and what could families do to move the needle forward on the matters at hand? Of course, another issue is that Tiffany ran the PTO meeting and not the Co-Chairs, so in what ways can we empower the Co-Chairs of the PTO to build their capacity and confidence as leaders and help to galvanize interest and support from families to serve Barrie?
Meeting #3: Middle and Upper School (MUS) Staff and Faculty Meeting
Division Head Ah-Young begins the meeting sitting at the helm with her computer open, the Google Doc agenda displayed for all to see. She thanks everyone for coming and moves quickly into the agenda, reviewing various announcements, then calling upon others to share anything of note for the room to know. As people share event announcements, Ah-Young begins sending calendar invitations to confirm attending them. When Marion talks about introducing a coin challenge for fundraising, Ah-Young immediately starts recording and confirming the advisory locations for each homeroom. We then speed through the following announcements and appreciations before moving to the next item of business:
Buildings & Grounds Committee ideas - talk to AY if you have ideas/suggestions this week!
Supervision Reminder
Open Advisory: Please supervise students on Fridays - ty!
Classes: Accompany students if doing an outside activity, esp MS.
UE presenting on countries on 11/2 Thurs 10-1130am in gym - please stop by w/ or w/o students if you can!
6th Graders presenting on UN Sustainable Devl. Goals
Instructions for Conferences sent out (Sam)
Appreciations to Rachel J, Meagan, RT, Rebecca, Nysear - MS bonfire!
Tish out Fri and Mon
I notice there is no food present, and the very few teachers present spend the time on their computers emailing students about missing work, online shopping, or sending Google Chats to one another about the pointlessness of this meeting.
Co-Director of Experiential Education Colleen Dunn then makes a few announcements regarding the Fall Expeditions that had just taken place the week prior. She reminds faculty and staff to update their budget spreadsheets, send any incident reports to her and Co-Director Paul Leistra, and to return all med bags to the school nurse. She then invites us all to spend a few moments to complete the feedback form. The room goes quiet, punctuated only by the clacks of keystrokes. After some time, Colleen thanks us and we move on to the final piece of business for the day: Problems of Practice Discussion.
Ah-Young directs us to check our email for a document she scheduled to be sent around the start of the meeting, which contains information on the Problems of Practice protocol. She then turns the matter over to Meagan Hairston, the MUS Counselor, to steer the conversation (I later find out that she had heard of this the day of the meeting). She invites teachers to split into two rooms: one to discuss the socioemotional challenges that students have been facing, the other to discuss academic challenges. Neither group follows the protocol, instead devolving into general discussion about the problems students are having adjusting to some of the new smartphone policies in place. Some staff end up complaining about students, while others
MUS meetings are highly organized and structured, filled with lots of to-the-letter details of what needs to be done when, where, and by whom. However, problems of practice or bigger-ticket items end up being placed last in the list, with minimal time to get into the weeds of important discussion. Examining the final part of the meeting more closely, MUS staff and faculty should have had time to review it before engaging in it. Discussing the socioemotional and academic needs of students also should occur in the same space, as they often intersect. Of course, the entire meeting should have been this focus—or faculty and staff should meet more regularly to discuss these matters. However, the school schedule prohibits opportunities for these kinds of conversations from taking place. Thus, they get lumped in with everything else.
If I were running the MUS faculty and staff meeting, I would spend this weekly Monday meeting held after school focused on one fundamental thing and nothing more. Staff energy is low, and attention would thus be limited. Spending more time centering and discussing students’ needs would be most fruitful, as would giving opportunities for faculty and staff to think through successes and learning from the previous week’s Fall Expeditions. But not both. Institutionally, Barrie would need to rethink its daily schedule so that it affords teachers more time to come together at different parts of the week to think through its practices. Instead, it’s all just wishful thinking.
Reflections on My Own Meeting
I led our DEI Committee in its regular meeting. Attached is an excerpt from an email I sent to colleagues:
For this meeting, I'd like for you to bring 3 priorities that you want to focus on in the DEI space, with a focus on the goals that we laid out at the start of this year. Add them to this Jamboard; please write your name so we know who wrote what. Some samples are thrown in for you. We'll spend time in our session seeing where people are and what we want to do. If you cannot make the meeting for any reason, I still recommend you complete the activity so that we can see what our priorities are and what alignments exist.
We'll spend time in our session seeing where people are and what action steps we wish to take following the meeting.
The accompanying Google Doc featured the following agenda, which would be fleshed out with notes taken by a volunteer:
● Check-In (5 mins.)
● Review Jamboard (5 mins.): What alignments exist? What themes stand out?
● Discuss Opportunities for Collaboration and Action: 7/7/7 (30 mins.)
● Close Out: Action Items Moving Forward (5 mins.)
At the start of the meeting, three attendees appear out of a committee of 22: Rachel Kramer, Tiffany Smith, and Arietni Douglas. Prior to this meeting, I received several emails from colleagues, noting that the scheduled time did not work for them, despite the fact that on the survey released in the beginning of the year, the time mentioned indeed worked.
After some unscripted mingling, coupled with refreshments, we turn to the matter at hand. I call an audible and rather than have all of us review the jamboard as a collective, I assign each person a pillar: Institutional Policies and Practices; Family Education, Programming, and Partnership; Student Leadership and Empowerment; and Faculty Development and Professional Growth. I tell them to point out 2–3 things that seem noteworthy to share with the group as a whole. After some time, we share a few matters (at this point, Ah-Young arrives).
We eventually land on engaging alumni as a chief concern, since we only ever get recent alumni to share thoughts on the state of the school and where it could go. We want to see how best we can engage alumni of color and get their perspective on what Barrie might need to move forward as it seeks to become an eminent progressive independent school committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. To that end, I try to coach my teammates to arrive at their own action steps, using the 7/7/7 framework: Where do we want to be in 7 months? 7 weeks? Thus, what can we get done in the next 7 days to get started?
Looking back, I notice now that the problem is that my colleagues do not think 7 months ahead. We cannot. We either think 7 years ahead or 7 days ahead, but never an appropriate, medium-to-long-term distance. As a leader, I want my colleagues to feel like they came up with the idea themselves, coached in the thinking necessary to solve problems and make change. As a teacher, I relied heavily on inductive teaching, the art of, to paraphrase Harold Edgerton, teaching in such a way that people only find out they are learning when it is too late (qtd. in Stevens, 2013). The same concept applies to leadership: I think of that process as an important part of building leadership within the team. My colleagues would build leadership without even their knowledge, and in turn feel more confident to enact policies, effect change, etc., within the school. However, it seems that I need to be more direct with colleagues, finding smaller opportunities to build those leadership skills. Ah-Young demonstrated that by pointing out to Tiffany that she could use her weekly Advancement Team meeting as an opportunity to begin conversation. As of this writing, she has not brought up the subject due to overwhelm with matters concerning the PTO and the auction.
The other problem is that I need my whole team present. School-wide, Barrie needs to rethink its daily and weekly schedule. Until that point, our team will remain ineffective at getting things done, and I would need to meet with selected individuals at unique times rather than bringing a cadre of individuals together to develop programming, institute new policies, and brainstorm and articulate visions for the future. Everything is piecemeal, and nothing ever seems to move forward due to an overwhelmed faculty stretched to the absolute brink, and a school climate that does not really think of meetings as an opportunity to think through and solve problems and challenges posed by members of the team. While I certainly can think of ways to do this at the micro and even mezzo levels as a senior administrator, I am bound by the constraints of scheduling and the demands placed on the faculty and staff at Barrie.