Collaborative team meetings are a cornerstone of fostering student success and enhancing classroom practices. But achieving meaningful outcomes requires careful preparation.
Here’s a checklist and a list of considerations to ensure that your collaborative team meetings are purposeful, effective, and impactful.
1. How can teachers come prepared for the meeting?
A pre-meeting organizer is an essential tool for setting the stage.
- Identify the Focus: Clearly define the meeting’s primary focus—whether it’s literacy, student engagement, or wellbeing. Aligning the focus with the school’s key priorities ensures relevance and coherence and connects the collaborative team meeting directly to your school improvement plans.
- Flag Key Students: Allows teachers to reflect in advance on which students or topics to bring forward ensuring that our consideration is proactive and not reactive to specific situations that may occur prior to a meeting.
- Provide Context: Share supporting materials, like data or past notes, to ensure everyone comes prepared.
- Gather Responses: Some school leaders gather responses prior to the meeting to get an awareness of the key issues coming forward. This allows leaders to prepare and design the ‘just right’ key issues as well it may provide an opportunity to combine some key issues.
- Pre-Meeting Organizers Templates and Samples - there are lots of options, please feel free to adapt and adjust for your school:
- Pre-meeting Organizer - this is a simple template to ensure focus and efficiency during a collaborative team meeting.
- Data-Informed Pre-Meeting Organizer - this is a template to complete prior to a Collaborative Team Meeting, related to data colours, to help focus on specific students to initiate discussions.
- Pre-Meeting Organizer - Data-Informed Statements - this template reinforces the use of data to inform the celebrations, student of concern and student to enrich in the collaborative team meeting using data informed statements.
- Whitecourt Central Pre-Meeting Organizer - This sample comes from a school in northern Alberta. Take note of the criteria established at the top of the pre-meeting organizer.
2. What could an agenda look like?
Consistency for the agenda is key to productive meetings.
- Structure and Sequence: Use a consistent format that outlines the meeting’s flow and includes sections for note-taking. Here is a template for a collaborative team meeting that guides the structures and processes as well as serves a notekeeping function.
- Fill in the Basics: Add simple details like the date, team members, and focus ahead of time.
- Leverage Tools: If using systems like WeCollab, schedule the meeting, include attendees, and upload the agenda in advance. This saves time and ensures everyone is on the same page. To learn more about WeCollab, go to our website to learn how others are using this tool to enhance their Collaborative Response.
3. How do we articulate shared expectations?
Norms guide behavior and set the tone for collaboration.
- Choose a Focus Norm: Instead of reciting all norms, highlight one specific norm for the meeting. For example, focus on “being concise and action-oriented” if previous meetings tended to go off-track.
- Engage with the Norm: Incorporate small activities to reinforce adherence, such as reflective discussions or visual cues (e.g., bingo chips or elastic bands). Here is a resource with a number of ideas on how you can reinforce norms. Below is a video compilation of possible ways to incorporate in your team meetings.
- Reflect Post-Meeting: Dedicate a few minutes to evaluate how well the team adhered to the norm.
4. Do I have the necessary resources ready for teams?
Being prepared with physical and digital resources streamlines the process.
- Role Assignments: Establish roles (facilitator, note-taker, timekeeper) with clear descriptions. Use role cards or displays for clarity. For additional information on determining roles, please read Determining Roles in Collaborative Team Meetings.
- Essential Tools: Ensure items like sticky notes, pens, and printed continuums are readily available. If meeting spaces vary, use a mobile bin stocked with these essentials.
- Continuum Accessibility: Display or bring copies of the collaborative continuums to guide discussions effectively and to ensure teachers are referencing the continuums for ideas.
5. How can the physical environment provide support?
The arrangement of the meeting space can significantly impact participation and psychological safety.
- Seating Arrangement: Set up a horseshoe or circle to ensure everyone has eye contact and feels included.
- Visual Notes: Project meeting notes in a way that all attendees can see them while staying physically connected to the group. Consider investing in tools like wireless keyboards or mice for flexibility.
6. Anything else to consider before a CTM?
A brief pre-reading activity can spark ideas and enrich discussions.
- Relevant Articles: Share concise, targeted resources related to the meeting’s focus, such as “Five Ways to Increase Engagement” or “Strategies to Improve Executive Functioning.”
- Promote Reflection: Encourage team members to think about how the ideas apply to their classrooms, fostering a deeper, more tailored conversation during the meeting.
Effective collaborative team meetings don’t happen by chance. With thoughtful preparation, these gatherings can become powerful opportunities to enhance student outcomes and professional practices.
We’d love to hear your strategies for preparing successful meetings. Reach out with your insights, and be sure to explore the additional resources linked in this post. Connect with us at or .
In this mock meeting, Kurtis Hewson facilitates a collaborative team meeting, demonstrating the structures and processes integral to the meeting format and fidelity.
Watch Video
Examining Collaborative Team Meetings - Establishing and Reinforcing Norms
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