Ideas for Carving Out Time for Teacher Team Meetings

       In this article in The Learning Professional, Anne Jolly lays out an extensive menu of ways to give teams time to meet during and after the school day:

• Bank time:

-   Lengthen the regular school day and save the extra minutes to create larger blocks of time for team meetings.

-   Start school 30 minutes earlier Monday through Thursday and dismiss two hours early on Friday to create a weekly block of time for meetings.

-   Schedule regular early-dismissal or late-start days.

-   Shave minutes off lunch and bank the time for team meetings.

-   Total the hours teachers meet after school and don’t require teachers to report to school for that amount of time on regularly scheduled teacher workdays (when practical).

• Buy time:

-   Use paraprofessionals to release teachers during the school day for meetings.

-   Hire a team of rotating substitute teachers to release teachers for meetings.

-   Hire one or two permanent substitute teachers to regularly free teachers to meet.

-   Schedule a team of substitute teachers for a day a week to release teachers on a rotating basis.

-   Hire more teachers, clerks, and support staff to expand or add teacher meeting time.

• Use common time:

-   Schedule common planning time for same-grade/same-subject teachers to meet.

-   Organize special subjects into blocks to create common time for teams to meet.

-   Schedule planning periods immediately before or after lunch to allow for double-period meeting time.

-   Create double planning periods in the schedule.

• Use resource personnel for student learning activities:

-   Get administrators teaching some classes to free up teachers for meetings.

-   Allow teaching assistants and/or college interns to monitor classes.

-   Pair teachers so one teaches while the other meets with colleagues.

-   Plan off-site student field trips and use the time for meetings.

-   Ask parent volunteers to monitor classes for an hour while teams meet.

-   Have professionals from local colleges, businesses, government agencies, and community agencies lead student activities and use the time for teacher meetings.

• Free teachers from non-instructional requirements:

-   Use non-homeroom teachers to occasionally perform homeroom duties to give teachers a block of before-school and homeroom time.

-   Reassign school personnel to allow teachers to meet during pep rallies and assemblies.

-   Reassign non-instructional clerical and management tasks so teachers have more time to focus on instruction and collaboration.

• Add professional days to the school year:

-   Create multi-day summer learning institutes for in-depth PD.

-   Create a midyear break for students and use those days for teacher learning.

• Use existing time more effectively:

-   Put routine announcements in newsletters and/or e-mails to staff and reserve faculty meetings for professional learning,

-   Provide shorter, more-frequent meetings by spreading time from existing planning days across the calendar.

“Team Basics” by Anne Jolly in The Learning Professional, December 2017 (Vol. 38, #6, p.

63-68), drawn from Jolly’s book, Team to Teach: A Facilitator’s Guide to Professional

Learning Teams (National Staff Development Council, 2008), no e-link available

The summary above is reprinted with permission from issue #719 of The Marshall Memo, an outstanding resource for educators.