27 Ways to Engage Teachers at Your Next Faculty Meeting

This article originally was published by Teach Thought on September 23, 2018. It was written by Teacher Thought Staff and appears below in its original entirety including the images.

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 workday—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 seek 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.