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Great Meetings --
What Will You Learn?

How many hours did you spend in meetings this week? How would you like to come away from all those meetings feeling that your valuable time was well spent? Impossible, you say? We believe that everyone can run great meetings -- and get great results.

We are passionate about meetings. We believe that it is important to bring together groups of people to work on solving problems, because groups can generate great ideas and change the world. When you bring together people with different ideas, experience, and expertise there is synergy, new ideas are born, and breakthroughs can happen.

Often administrators, group leaders, and teachers are not trained in facilitation skills. Even with the best of intentions, this lack of skills can lead to ineffective meetings, wasted time and money, and no results. We believe it is possible for anyone to learn good facilitation skills. In the weeks ahead, we will share with you some hints on how to better prepare for, design, and facilitate all the meetings you schedule. We'll

• talk about the ways group dynamics impact your meetings.
• show you how to articulate a clear purpose and outcomes for a meeting.
• share a variety of tools for generating and evaluating ideas and for making decisions.
• talk about ways to intervene in difficult situations to get a meeting back on track or to manage conflicts.

We want you to be able to transform the way you manage your school meeting time so that administrators and teachers alike go happily to meetings and come out satisfied that something has been accomplished.

Article by Dee Kelsey and Pam Plumb
Education World®
Copyright © 2006 Education World