How many meetings do you have a week?

Hi. I'm just curious... How many meetings do you generally have a week? And would you say they're generally valuable, or not so much?

Trying to decide if my meeting load is typical and I'm just a princess who needs to suck it up, or if this is as ridiculous as it feels.

Every week, I have a minimum of three mandatory meetings; co-planning, PLT, and some variety of nonsense on Wednesdays. Every two weeks, we have a fourth grade level meeting, bumping it to four meetings just as a default. Add pre/post observations in there, an IEP or two (which we have every week because I teach grade level--we have TWO honors programs, so... yeah), and I'm looking at anywhere from five meetings a week to nine. I have ten off-periods a week.

Is this typical? I'd probably be less resentful if we actually accomplished anything in meetings, but generally my co-workers sit around and complain about students in an obscene way the entire time, which I fundamentally disagree with...

Anyway. Thanks for reading my pseudo-rant. Let me know. =)

 

At my current school, I have one regular weekly meeting with the grade-level teachers that I co-teach with, and I have one bi-weekly meeting with the other special education teachers at my school. Occasionally, I'll have an IEP meeting or an informal parent meeting, and I also have my pre- and post-observation meetings as they come up. So, I'd estimate that it comes out to roughly two per week.

At my last school, it felt like so much more! That was especially true when I taught special ed. As a gen ed teacher, it was less but still more than I have as a special ed teacher at my current school. Your meetings definitely sound excessive. Does your union negotiate when or how many meetings are held?

 

About the same as you. Less than half are productive, but some are mandated by law or district policy so there's nothing I can do about it.

 

One full staff meeting once a month for about 75 minutes. Occasional division meetings or meetings with the Special Ed teacher, but that's about it.

 

We meet during planning every day. Every. Single. Day. They really aren't always helpful. I don't see that we need to meet every week for some of the things. We also meet once a month after school.

 

I have about two meetings per week. One is my PLC meeting, which I actually really enjoy because it's just me and one other person, and we work very well together. I also enjoy the PLCs because we are paid extra for these! The other weekly meeting is either a book study or staff meeting or some other random thing. These meetings last less than 30 minutes and are usually fairly informative and helpful.

 

One weekly CLT meeting that is completely useless in every imaginable way, and then informal meetings with my team that are actually useful.

 

1 grade level meeting plus one committee meeting per week on average. Mostly productive

If you ate finding your meetings to be not helpful
Or productive
What are you doing to refocus the group?

 

Average is 2 per week. One grade level planning per week and one other, but some weeks it is 4-5 meetings and then the next week just 1. But we just have one planning/conference time per day.

 

I'm a sped teacher so meetings are a huge part of the job. In an average week I would say I have about 5 meetings pertaining to IEPs (actual IEP meetings, assessment summary conference meetings for upcoming reevals or initials, or referrals). Some lucky weeks I may have only 2 or 3 IEP related meetings, but there are also weeks where I may have 10 or more. The week after break I have 12 meetings scheduled! I also occasionally have problem solving meetings for students that already have IEPs, but it varies. Some weeks I may have none; the week before break we had 4.

We have a team meeting once per week during lunch. Admin attends; apparently the school psych really pushed for this the year before I got to the school because she felt like they needed to know what was going on in sped. While that's a valid point, I feel that their presence often makes our meetings less productive because people don't speak as freely. A lot of times, we've already discussed the issues privately and the team meeting ends up just being a time for us to formerly document it in our notes.

Once per month, we have a full day of RtI meetings. Writing sub plans is a pain, but I'm thankful that these are during the school day and not after school.

I have a leadership team meeting once per month. I HATE these. They are 90 minutes long all after contract time and 90% of the time the content discussed does not pertain to sped in any way. I'm just sitting there wasting my time and listening to the gen ed teachers discuss things.

We have a staff meeting for one hour and 15 mins past contract time twice per month. These are annoying because much of the time is used for PD, and we already do TONS of PD. If they just kept this time to actual "staff meeting" information that needed to be discussed, they would be 20-30 minutes tops. We have early release Fridays twice per month where students leave at 12:30 and we have 3 hours of PD, in addition to about 6 full day PD days per year (not including the days before school starts). I do not understand why we need to do PD at the staff meetings as well. Again, maybe I'm just bitter about this because the content often does not apply to me.

 

I have 4 meetings scheduled per week, PLCs. I meet with the lower grade and upper grade teachers twice a week. This doesn't include other meetings I have to have with administration.

 

Each and every Wednesday is minimum day. Teachers use that time for PLC meetings. Additionally, we have a monthly staff meeting (that is also held on a Wednesday--after the PLC meetings).

 

We have 1 staff meeting every Tuesday, after school, usually an hour and a half. They're very productive. We're getting a WASC visit in the spring, so we also had very lengthy meetings for preparation, once a month.

 

One of the greatest things about my school- we have very, very few meetings. We have one staff meeting a month and I have one beginning teacher meeting a month. I meet when needed with my PLC partner, which is usually once every 7 work days or so for about 10 minutes.

That's IT!!!!

 

2 weekly meetings: PLC (every Friday) and grade level

Once a month staff meeting

Once a month leadership team meeting

IEP/ RTI meetings as needed, which is frequent for me this year!

 

We have a meeting every morning. Staff meetings, grade level meetings, subject meetings, and PD sessions rotate daily. Friday's we have a "school atmosphere" meeting and they provide breakfast and we share positive things from the week that happened.

 

Nothing can be done. The direction/focus is mandated by admin and or the district. Suggestions are not encouraged. Basically we have to wait until the end of the year and fill out a survey.

 

One a week except the last week of the month. Occasionally I may be asked to go to an IEP meeting or parent/student meeting under extenuating circumstances.

 

My administration isn't interested in having productive meetings. They are mostly interested in looking good at principal meetings and have us spend our time making useless but (apparently) nice-looking curriculum maps that make no sense whatsoever to any teacher in the building but that are supposedly big hits at the district level.

 

My last school had one per MONTH (private school)
My current one usually has one at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, but no more than 5 per month

 

We have a grade level meeting once a week for "planning" We have full staff meetings at least one a month. Sometimes we will get an electronic staff meeting. (basically a power point with bullets ) Our weekly grade level meetings are usually a waste of my time. We supposedly go to plan together but not once has anyone shared their lesson plans with me nor have they asked me what I was going to do. We pretty much do what we want in our classes as long as we follow our district mandated curriculum. Even our principal has said she has no idea why we meet she can walk into our 6 different classes and see 6 different lessons on the same thing. There are some weeks that we meet we have one thing on the agenda of the meeting. This year we even have a half to day to plan once a six weeks and I find that enough to plan everything we need to plan.

 

We have a really small division--only 4 of us teaching grade 7 or 8 home room. We've been known to have impromptu meetings in the hall either before or after school if there are issues.

 

We have 4-6 per week, most of them totally a waste of time. We are lucky if we get our planning period free once a week.

 

My immediate teaching team meets once a week but emails like crazy in between. I oversee a second team which also meets once a week at a different time. Both teams alternate between housekeeping and data analysis. Every other week, I have a separate meeting with the rest of the department leadership team. Not terrible, but I have to balance my time carefully.

 

Honestly--sometimes, these are the most beneficial and productive. They're short and to the point due to time constraints.

 

So your administration KNOWS that the meetings are not productive, acknowledges it, and is purposely and consciously creating a dog and pony show? (In my opinion these types of admin should be fired or retrained, but are not effective)

Our meetings are the same as yours, but my perspective is different, I believe they have no idea what makes a meeting meaningful, they have either never been part of a highly productive grade level team or they think something like "PLC" sounds amazing on paper and just don't see how broken it truly is from one grade level team to another. This is at least the case at my site.

 

All meetings should be this way. htey should be organic conversations that address the authentic needs of the grade level team, not the coersive, artificial check lists of a PLC type program.

 

You said "Trying to decide if my meeting load is typical and I'm just a princess who needs to suck it up, or if this is as ridiculous as it feels."
I think I can identify with you and it's probably ridiculous for you.
I hate to say this, but for others (maybe the in-with-the-principal-crowd), it is really fun.
It seemed that way at one school. Most of the time the meetings were all about showing what they know about the theory of education. Every time I was nice to them, tried to act like everything they said was very interesting to me, and then I just went teaching the way I have done for years. I was pretty quiet and shy in those meetings until I found out many others felt the same way and until I got old enough to retire, take chances and start speaking out. When I became an outspoken critic of the ridiculousness, my job became increasingly difficult and my contract was not renewed.
I have been in better schools with no "in-with-the-principal-crowd," having a no-nonsense principal where meetings were quick - sometimes only a few minutes.

 

I am met to death. I have 2 team meetings, a special topic meeting, a early release meeting on top of the three subject area meetings plus any IEP and 504 meetings that may arise. Most of our meetings could be dealt with using email.

 

You have at least 8 scheduled meetings every week? If these are desired grade level planning and discussion meetings that are meeting your needs.....that is awesome....I suspect this is not the case.

If it is not the case, it makes me laugh, just close your eyes and imagine how your admin's classroom looked and ran when they were a teacher....RFLMAO.

 

Email would solve most of my meetings too!

 

I am very lucky. We have after school faculty meetings once or twice a month, monthly trainings during our planning, and parent conferences as scheduled by the office (usually no more than one or two a month.) That's it! We recently had some shuffling of administration and our new administrator only has meetings when we need to.

 

Mandatory meetings are staff once a week, PD once a week, and team twice a week. Other meetings will vary for IEPs, SITs, or Behavior Meetings. There are more meetings for TAP evaluations.

I would say the only meeting that is beneficial to me is PD. All the other meetings are such a waste of time. I am trying REALLY hard to convince admin to move many of these meetings to the Google Cloud since we just switched over our emails to Google, but it is slow going since many of our veteran teachers (and many teachers in their 30s oddly enough) are not tech-comfy.

*sigh*

 

We have one meeting each week (PLC). Additionally, we have one staff meeting/month, an ESST meeting if we are referring students to the student services team, and I am on our school's leadership team, which meets once/month (we are given release time for this) and I have a PSSC meeting where I am the teacher rep once/month. As far as mandatory meetings, we have five/month.

 

I'd say 3-4 a month including school, department and team meetings.

 

We have grade level meetings once a week which are more productive if our principal is there. She is a no nonsense king of girl, so she tries to keep the meetings as brief as possible with information that will be beneficial to the students. Beginning this month, K-2 will meet every two weeks after school. We had one meeting last week and it was very productive.

 

We have a monthly staff meeting (~1 hour), each have different monthly leadership meetings (~1hour, though this varies more) and then during our weekly early release, we have various meetings on most days - some prof. dev., some PLC, some tech training, some growth goals, etc..., mixed in with about a dozen individually directed days (basically plain old plan time). Our grade level team also meets once a week during a 30 minute block during a shared plan or lunch time. Most are pretty productive.

 

1 a week - I used to work somewhere where I had a meeting every. single. day. also and it was miserable.

 

Speaking of meetings. This week was the first time in 3 years that we wont have a grade level meeting. Why? because someone actually got smart and asked if we really needed one since we just had a huge planning meeting on the 5th. Can we get an AMEN sista!!!!