Leadership Team

What I Learned In School Today: listening in a meeting can be more important than following the agenda.

Committees exist within my school with various areas of focus ranging from assemblies to building climate. Our building leaders play an important role on these committees, but not wanting to over schedule and inundate everyone with meetings, we have not regularly met as a building leadership team. This year we will meet monthly as a leadership team.

The first building leadership team was held today and it was valuable. My principal and I planned to discuss our professional learning plan for the year and share our new method for collecting incident reports from teachers. While our agenda items were important, the conversation quickly went to other topics. That was the best part of the meeting!

My principal and I called the meeting today with a specific agenda in mind, but the conversation quickly went in other directions. As it turns out, our building leaders had important issues to discuss regarding report card comments. While we often discuss these topics with our grade/department leaders, the leaders themselves do not always get to discuss things across grades and departments. In this case, listening to the teachers and allowing the leaders to guide the discussion was far more valuable.