Effective School Management

Process review
Exercise 3 at the end of the chapter is a ‘group performance checklist’ which
can be used to ‘score’ a meeting which you have attended. It highlights eight
areas which are key to a meeting’s success and asks you to judge to what
extent various behaviours are shown.
Such checklists can be used to powerful effect in a training context, where
the various participants to a meeting first record their individual scores, and
then compare scores, discuss the reasons for the scores, and in particular for
any discrepancies, and finally decide how they will improve their
effectiveness as a group in subsequent meetings.
Following the use of such a procedure for training purposes, some groups
build a review into their normal meeting procedure, at the end or after the
first 20 minutes of a lengthy meeting, or at any time when the meeting
appears to be losing its effectiveness. This can become a relatively short
procedure in which a practised and ‘open’ group will immediately bring
forward perceptions such as ‘We completely ignored Mrs X’s point’ or ‘We
are each defending our parochial interests again’.
There is further discussion of group dynamics in Chapter 10.
Whether or not they have a formal role, the aim of each meeting