Effective School Management

Figur
e 5.2
Spidergram:
 branches

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MANAGING MEETINGS
6 7
PERSONAL APPLICATIONS
(1) Draw a spidergram linking the subjects in this or any other chapter.
(2) Apply the above principles to the next meeting you run, not forgetting to
annotate your own agenda with target times and purpose against each agenda
item.
GROUP DYNAMICS
A valuable exercise is to watch a video recording of a meeting, preferably one
in which you have taken part. If this is not possible, you will have to rely on
sitting back and observing. Among the phenomena which you may notice are
(1) repetition by the same person of the same point;
(2) failure of people to take up each other’s points except to attack them with
a ‘Yes, but…’;
(3) ‘not invented here’ reactions;
(4) lack of interest manifested by ‘body language’;
(5) arguments about the structure of the meeting: ‘Wouldn’t it be best if we
first…’,  ‘I don’t see how we can decide that before…‘, and constant
changes in approach to the problem;
(6) people trying to ‘score’ off each other;
(7) several people talking at once;
(8) ‘blocking out’ of certain people and alliances between others; and
(9) possibly some skilful manipulation of the meeting.
Meetings can take place in which the results are less the result of logical and
constructive debate than of skilled games play. You may have come across
examples of the following:
Clique-forming. In this activity certain members of the meeting have an
implicit or explicit understanding that they will support each other whatever
the rights and wrongs of a particular issue.
Selective support. This game may be played by the chairperson who
carefully selects for consideration those ideas which approximate to his or
her own while ignoring those which do not. A variant is played by the
ordinary meeting participant who does not express his or her own opinion
but waits until other people have spoken before making a remark like: ‘I
think that Mr X hit the nail on the head when he said … and Mrs Y had a
good point. Couldn’t we build on these by …?‘ There is a fair chance that any
idea which follows will be supported by X and Y, who are flattered that
someone has actually listened to them.
Selective minute writing. Careful selection has been known to destroy the
true impact of a meeting!
Failure to listen. This is the game of asking people for their views in order to
ignore them.

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6 8
EFFECTIVE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT
While we don’t suggest that you should use manipulative tactics, it is
important that you should be able to recognize them and counteract them.
Commitment to the results or decisions will depend on the apparent honesty
of the decision process and conduct of meetings.