Finding Time in a Health Pandemic

by Amy Arbogash, CETL Director of Technology and Personalized Learning

“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.” -Harvey MacKay

Time. It’s a funny concept. Time has become such a commodity in our world, we look for anything that will help us save it, gain it, or optimize it. Educators can probably relate to the conundrum of time now more than ever living in a world that is going through a health pandemic. Our profession has been met with transformative times with such topics as school safety, mental health, technology, personalized learning, new curriculum, budget, standardized testing...and now COVID-19. Time has become the one resource in education of which we never seem to have enough.

And yet, when we have the time together as a staff, we rarely take full advantage of that time. We have all experienced traditional staff meetings that use time for informational delivery. There isn’t meaningful collaboration. There isn’t active learning. There aren’t opportunities for teacher leaders. There isn’t modeling, choice, or transformation.

As educational leaders, we need to find ways to get time on our side, and one of the ways that has seen a track record of success is the process of flipping a meeting. Traditional staff meetings are often full of information that teachers do not need to be together in a meeting to hear. The overall idea of a flipped meeting is to remove this information from the meeting and provide it to teachers ahead of time. Teachers become responsible for viewing the information on their own prior to the staff meeting. Removing these informational pieces and asking teachers to review them prior to the staff meeting gains much needed time back together as a staff.

When you gain this time back in your meetings, you can determine how to use that time more effectively. Right now more than ever, teachers need time to work together through their new normal. They need space to talk about the challenges they and their students and families are facing. Flipped staff meetings can give you the opportunity to give this time to the teachers.

For more specificity, there are three main parts to flipping your staff meeting: the planning, the flip, and the staff meeting.

The Planning

The real challenge with flipping staff meetings will come in determining what you want to do with your staff with the time you will gain. The options for this are unlimited and varied by need. When you have a focus, or several, find your teacher leaders and develop a leadership team. Work together to build a vision of what you feel is important and how you will accomplish your task.

As your leadership team works on building out your vision, remember to focus on how you want the meetings run. Replacing one kind of informational meeting with a different kind of informational meeting is not accomplishing your goal in flipping a staff meeting. Make sure you are focusing on collaboration and active learning. Find ways to include teacher choice. Bring meaning, transformation, and innovation into staff meetings. Lean on your teacher leaders for ideas and inspiration.

The Flip

There are two pieces you will need for the flip: information and primers. Prior to the staff meeting, determine what information your staff needs to receive and any prep work (primers) they will need to do prior to the staff meeting. Then take all this information and create a screencast or compose an email or newsletter. Send this to the staff ahead of time with enough time to review the information before the staff meeting.

The Staff Meeting

This is when you see all of your work come to fruition. You can start with a five minute question and answer session from the information sent and then implement the plan for the meeting. This is often a time for administration and the leadership team to facilitate and listen to what is going on around them. It will help to get feedback during and after the meeting to continue your progress. Knowing what is working and what you can improve on will help you to become more and more successful with flipping staff meetings.

Flipping staff meetings can be challenging, but when you realize what you can accomplish during the time you have together with your staff, it is well worth the work. You’ll gain teacher leaders, model effective classroom practices, and engage your teachers in meaningful work that will lead them through these historic times.