Do you find yourself attending meetings without understanding their purpose? Are you looking to define the layers of teams in your organization?
WeCollab can help to coordinate these details!
Defining Layers of Teams
Lorna Hewson describes layered collaborative structures and processes in her blog post Scaffolding our Collaborative Response: Purposeful Layering of Team Meetings.
In their blog post Reduce the Number of Meetings…By Adding One More!, Kurtis Hewson and Lorna Hewson share the missing piece that is the Collaborative Team Meeting as they discuss layers of teams within a school setting.
Bonus: Watch as Lorna Hewson unpacks the contradictory statement “Reduce Your Meetings…by Adding One More!” (For the full conversation, watch here).
Establishing Meeting Descriptors
In 4 Mistakes Leaders Make When Setting Up Collaborative Team Meetings, Kurtis Hewson describes the importance of staff understanding the purpose of the meeting they are attending.
Within WeCollab, the ability to customize the names and the descriptions of meetings from a school or district level allows for clear communication of the layers of teams as well as the possibility for other individual and small group meetings that may also be recorded in the software.
Under the Student Profile Configurations (at both the School and the District level), there is a section for Meeting Descriptors. At the School level, where a lock button is closed, it means that the meeting descriptors can only be changed at the district level.
Clicking the Edit button (pencil icon) will open another window. Meeting Descriptors that cannot be edited will be greyed out.
At all levels, the Collaborative Team Meeting descriptor will be greyed out as its purpose is defined for the system based on the intention of Collaborative Response as shared by Jigsaw Learning. At the district level, particular meeting descriptors can be assigned to specific schools to maintain consistency across the jurisdiction but to avoid overpopulating a dropdown menu in schools where the descriptor is not required.
Additional meeting descriptors are populated by default based on Jigsaw Learning’s Layered Collaborative Structures so that schools and districts have a starting place to work from. However, these descriptors are not set in stone, which holds true for any edits that a school or district makes. Common understanding evolves over time, and the titles for the descriptors as well as the details may need to be updated to align with that understanding. What is important is that the title of the meeting (read: meeting type) be easily recognizable and that the descriptor (read: purpose) be articulated in such a way that everyone understands when to select that meeting type to record the meeting details.
Meetings with Clarity and Predictability
Clearly establishing meeting descriptors provides clarity and predictability for attendees as they arrive prepared to fulfill the purpose of each meeting. WeCollab provides a space to identify the various types of meetings in a school that might be recorded in such a way that the descriptors may be accessed via hover text to remind users of that purpose.
There is elegance in simplicity, and WeCollab provides just such a solution for coordinating the details that articulate the layers of teams and the purpose for their meetings.