Meeting Wise: Making the Most of Collaborative Time for Educators

"Meeting Wise offers a set of guidelines and case studies, with the aim of giving educators practical advice for improving the efficacy of meetings. The text is more than a handbook, however. Boudett and City seek to encourage educators to reconsider how they think about - and approach - the meetings they lead and attend. Educators need not view meetings as annoyances or distractions. Instead, the authors argue, these venues can be rich sources of collaboration and invention." -- Charlie Tyson, Inside Higher Ed "This is a short, practical book that I strongly recommend to any administrator. There is also useful advice on being a good meeting facilitator (rather than simply a chair) and on being a good participant. More importantly, when I finished reading the book, I could, in fact, imagine a time where I looked forward to meetings." -- Lee Skallerup Bessette, Women in Higher Education "Meeting Wise is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to gain value from his or her meetings. I, for one, will assign it to my leadership classes as a 'gift' title to enhance their skills and appreciation for collaborative learning." -- James J. Harrington, The Journal of Continuing Higher Education "Highly recommended especially for educators; Meeting Wise is also an extremely useful resource for any career professional." -- Jennifer Simmonds, Midwest Book Review

What's the scarcest resource in schools? Almost any educator will answer, "Time." The lack of time for colleagues to work together is one of the biggest barriers to improving teaching and learning. All too often, educators also say that the biggest waste of time ismeetings. People in schools attend dozens, if not hundreds, of meetings a year. How can that time be used wisely? This book, by two editors of Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning,attempts to bring about a fundamental shift in how educators think about the meetings they attend. The authors make the case that these gatherings are potentially the most important venue where adult and organizational learning can take place in schools, and that making more effective use of this time is an important key to increasing student achievement. In Meeting Wise, the authors show why planning meetings is a high-leverage strategy for changing how people work together in the service of school improvement. To this end, they have created a meeting-planning "checklist" to develop a common language for discussing and improving the quality of meetings. In addition, they provide guidelines for readers on "wise facilitating" and "wise participating," and also include "top tips" and "common dilemmas." Simple, succinct, and practical, Meeting Wise is designed to be read and applied at every level of the educational enterprise, from district leadership meetings and professional developmentsessions to teacher-team meetings and even teachers' meetings with parents and students.