You may have seen the “Brace Yourselves…More Meetings are Coming” meme inspired by Game of Thrones. I’ve seen that one circulate the hallways. A couple of years ago I also saw a copy of Lencioni’s book “DEATH by Meeting” prominently displayed in a few conspicuous spots around the office. It was a not-so-subtle hint from staff. While the entertainment industry provides us with a wide selection of office-inspired comedy choices, I’m surprised there isn’t even more. Meetings at work are such an easy target for a good laugh. And yet, in the world of organizational health and governance of human systems, meetings are unavoidable, if not sometimes essential. In fact, a recent piece I read in the New Yorker entitled “Was E-mail a Mistake” tells the history of e-mail and how some companies are going back to meetings as the communication method of choice. While the relative merits of asynchronous versus synchronous communication will continue to be debated (I, for one, am exhausted by the nonstop email tsunami), there is still room for improvement on the quality of our meetings.
In the education space, perhaps the most common meeting is a school’s Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) meeting. The ILT is typically comprised of administrators and key staff members who come together periodically to, as the name suggests, provide instructional leadership at the school site. In fact, in some states an ILT is required by law. While the ILT meeting might be ubiquitous in schools, those meetings vary tremendously in the degree to which they actually address instruction. In many cases, the ILT functions much more like a faculty senate, where conversations more closely resemble negotiations or event planning, rarely pushing into the much more contentious terrain of addressing instructional practice in classrooms. Members on the ILT are usually happy to provide input and opinions about how to run the school. Addressing the quality of instruction in other classrooms can be much trickier business.
On one level, the typical ILT focus on school logistics is absolutely fair. There is a lot going on in schools, with a lot of stakeholder needs and perspectives to consider. School events, procedures, and decisions about investment of scarce resources are matters that absolutely require input and consideration from a more distributed decision-making body than the principal or admin team alone. Often, the ILT becomes the de facto governing body of the school, where concerns are raised and ideas about improvements are deliberated and discussed. There needs to be a designated space for this type of work to happen.
The unfortunate thing, however, is that decisions about logistics and management of the school often crowd out any focus on what should matter most, which is the quality of the learning experience for students. City et. al (2009) famously outline the concept of the instructional core, that posits, among other things, that student learning can only improve as a consequence of “improvements in the level of content, teachers’ knowledge and skill, and student engagement.” In other words, everything else happening in schools is secondary to what happens in classrooms. Ironically, what is happening in classrooms does not always make the ILT agenda.
As a high school principal, I found much the same challenge at times with our “Lead Team.” My Lead Team was a talented group whom I really did see as valuable instructional leaders. Yet I too found that the majority of our planning time together was dedicated to matters of school administration and logistics. Even though I wanted to change this, it proved surprisingly difficult to focus the majority of our time on matters of instruction. My frustration with this finally led me to make a structural change, which was to add a second leadership team that would focus exclusively on instruction. Yes, we even called it our “Instructional Leadership Team.”
In theory, this was a step in the right direction to ensure that more of our leadership resources were focused on improving instructional practices in classrooms across the school. As is usually the case, reality proved to be a bit more complex. The primary challenge was that now we had two leadership teams, and that led to some confusion about priorities and who really had the authority to make decisions. In schools, being designated as a member of a leadership team by an administrator does not necessarily give you authority to make decisions on behalf of your colleagues. My Lead Team still held tremendous authority amongst their peers, and so the work of the ILT by default still needed the consideration and approval of the Lead Team if it wanted to go anywhere in practice.
Whatever the structure, it takes consistent dedication and courage to keep your eyes on instructional quality. It requires a vision for what quality teaching and learning looks like. It requires continual analysis of student work, peer observations, and courageous conversations about what is working well and what constitutes the next level of work. It requires a healthy professional culture that welcomes scrutiny and analysis. The pursuit of that type of professional culture starts with the ILT. It’s a meeting that says a lot about what is most important to the decision-makers at the school.