Engage Teachers at Faculty Meetings: Three Tips

Thanks to its partnership with publisher Eye on Education, EducationWorld is pleased to present this administrator advice from The 6 Keys to Teacher Engagement: Unlocking the Doors to Top Teacher Performance by Cathie E. West. This article discusses three ways to successfully engage teachers at your next faculty meeting or professional development event.

Share the Limelight

Your faculty is a rich source of instructional experts who can liven up professional meetings by demonstrating technology tools, sharing teaching materials they have developed, and modeling best practices. I have called upon teachers, for example, to demonstrate how to incorporate  streaming video into lessons; access math, reading and writing resource Web sites; use free online software to track student progress; and explain the cognitive demands associated with new curriculum standards. There is nothing more powerful than teachers teaching teachers.

Access the Internet

Many powerful Web sites can boost instructional effectiveness, so don't hesitate to use staff meeting time to cruise through these dynamite resources. The following, for example, are aimed at Common Core State Standards implementation:

• Achieve the Core: Free articles, research information, and teaching tools
• Teaching Channel: Videos of classroom teaching that support CCSS implementation
• ASCD Educore: Introduction to CCSS, literacy and math teaching tools, and transition management

Not surprisingly, using the Internet to obtain information is a highly engaging way to get your staff tuned in to new ideas.

Assess

Just like a good teacher, you need to check to see if you are getting your ideas across. You can assess participant understanding by calling on individuals or table groups to reteach a concept; monitoring pair share and team discussions; and giving pop quizzes, worksheets and small projects to complete.

I have also used entry and exit slips to check on my teachers' recall of concepts we have encountered during book studies. A recent staff meeting entry task, for example, asked teachers to explain—in writing—seven concepts selected from Formative Assessment and Standards Based Grading: "learning progressions; instructional feedback; and formative, obtrusive, unobtrusive, student-generated, and summative assessments" (Marzano, 2010, pp. 10-31).

We had studied these concepts several months earlier, and I wanted to find out what the staff remembered. I learned that retention was very strong for five of the seven concepts but fuzzy in regard to learning progressions and unobtrusive assessments. As a result, I revisited these vital assessment ideas at the very next faculty meeting.

Whichever avenue you choose for assessment, be sure to affirm appropriate responses, correct errors, and reteach when necessary.

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