Effective Departmental Meetings

Within the Spanish Department, we have put in place a new way to deal with our Departmental "meetings". Taking in consideration some concepts shared during the collaborative leadership workshop we had at the beginning of the year in February, we started a more open way to run our meetings. In short, it goes like this:

1. Each week, for the "Spanish meeting" we have put in place a voluntary system which suppose one (or a group of) Spanish teacher(s) will run the meeting sharing a "theme"/"pedagogical issue"/"discussion"/"etc" they think is needed to be touched/discussed, and he/she/them present it and develop it during the weekly session. The meeting also takes place in a different venue each week, usually, the classroom of (one of) the teacher(s) who will direct the meeting.

2. The "agenda" (with all the administrative items) is sent by me or the teacher(s) involved to everybody in advance and we only talk about the content of it when it is needed (and the main topic proposed has been already discussed/developed).

3. Me personally, as HoD, attend the meetings as one more teacher, and only moderate/decide things that would need me to do so, after the consensus has been achieved and/or has not been possible to achieve.

4. The model has experimented some adjustments during the year, like letting the Spanish B teachers to have their own parallel meeting/planning and/or other special needs.

5. All of these tends to encourage leadership in all the Spanish teachers and give the space for them to raise ideas/topics which otherwise would face bureaucratic fences to deal with. It also is an attempt to reduce the administrative talking in order to increase the more relevant pedagogical matters in our interaction.

The idea of keep moving from a hierarchical model to a collaborative one in a virtuous cycle is behind these new meetings style we have, in order to reduce bureaucratic stuff, refocusing our attention to pedagogical issues and encourage all the Departmental teachers to take leadership roles and propose/generate new ideas rather than being passive during the meetings.

I would say, it is going well so far, with interesting results, letting our teacher to be more creative and more engage in real educational matters. We hope this would help other departments to find their own way to develop and manage the change in a productive way.