 I'm absolutely delighted to be sleeping here today, and I'm even more delighted to have some of these new faces over on home terms in Ireland, so I'm glad that you can drag me all over and hope it's the first of many. Anyway, I'm Rachel, until very recently I was ddars at Sontrain Institute, just around the corner. Now I'm director and lecturer at the NA TESOL at UCD on the universities we have here. I mean, I had a lot to say about meetings when I went to a language school, having more to say about meetings now that we're at the university. And that's what I'm going to focus on today, because I'm going to look at how meetings fit into the broader perspective of communication. And I'm going to try and keep it quick because I precede the lunch break and I'll be very unpopular if I'm doing it to the left. Okay, so it's about communicating the right time at the right time, and I'm just looking at worst-case scenarios. I'll go there myself as well, and tell you one of mine was meetings. I'm addressing questions such as how many meetings are too many and how long it's too long. Why is it so difficult? I'm going to contextualise it in the language school context. And then I'm not going to say this is how to have effective meetings. I have no idea yet. But I'm going to propose some interesting paradigms that I can lend us through which to look at the more effective meetings. And then just look at it in the broader context so that we can have knowledge. Okay, so what's so wrong with meetings anyway? Because it's kind of like this, oh God, meetings are awful, aren't they? I have to go to so many. I've got a few little kind of memes about a general consensus like meetings are just a little job. But it's essential to get together, isn't it? You can't not have meetings. It's important to be informed. I'll see what happens when you don't have meetings and it's not a pretty picture. How many meetings actually get informed when you can't think, oh God, I'm so glad I'm saying it. It's really useful, rich use of my time. I'm just surprised at laughter at not. I mean, a third of all meetings are a complete waste of time. I've done some research into this. I put a link up there. I put you on mismanaged. Lots of things are wrong with it. Meaning some managers waste over two months of their work on my meeting. I've attended one meeting and felt I could just waste two months of my life in it. I've never managed to go that over a year. So let's just have a look at the laughter moments. What goes wrong, loads and loads of things go wrong. The one thing that can go wrong is the agenda's not clear. I'm not fit to have it all. Time scale's not specified. So you're like, well, is this going to be a five minute meeting more? Or two hours and how do I fit in with everything else? Inviting everyone whether relevant or not? Or not inviting right people? In effective chair, I just think that's kind of good manners. Whether the time is up, it's up. Or let one person taking every chair should facilitate that. But sometimes they don't. Too many meetings as well. Or not enough meetings so that it's kind of almost pointless because it's out of context. I can't remember what happened last time. So much has happened since we had the last meeting. We can't really effectively discuss it. So that's kind of a tip of the iceberg. Really. So look at this. Before I tell you one of my last meetings. Mally didn't come alone in the meeting. I'm finding this. I'm going to treat him. I'm going to have another look. But one of mine was a meeting. I'd like to put this forward and everybody addressed it. But I just don't want to go over the time. I'd rather be on this today than over. So my worst meeting I think was. I had this big meeting. I hadn't been in the school long. They just didn't like having a new manager anyway. It's part of Change Management. I was making a lot of changes. The bigger context was that it was a difficult situation to walk into. It was part of my needs analysis. I noticed that you had these two breaks in a four-hour lesson. It was complete disruptive. The students took up a lot of time to leave and come back. It was to find us as a let's have a long break. Obviously and obviously unpopular with the teacher. You can imagine. I had my house in the right place. It wasn't a good decision in the long run. I thought it was going to be tricky. I did everything right. I was going to really walk with them. I was going to tell them I know it's difficult. I was going to sell the advantages. I was like, this is one of the hour meetings. I tried to keep meeting short to the lunch break. Less in the lunch break. I said no, I'm going to take the hour. So people come then to get it off their chest. I was so good. Before I went in, one of the students rushed up to me, Rachel. It's two years at the two-year anniversary of the Libyan Revolution. So we got a whole big meeting. Completely the old teacher event. It starts in 15 minutes. All of the students have made food. It's such a high rate. Of course, I had to go in. By the time everybody sat down, I had like five and a half minutes to say, sorry guys, I know you kind of love your two rates. It's going to be one. I mean it was awful. I didn't give it any chance. Okay, that's starting tomorrow. Let's go ahead. It's awful. It's like, just, I mean I did everything right, but things happen. I mean like when I've had angry staff, I won't even go into that because this has been filmed. So I'm not being put up for a meeting and I'm sure you all have your own meeting horror stories. Again, why is it so difficult? Well in a language school, I mean wouldn't it be a great job if it weren't for the teachers? Teachers have their own timetables. Some have other jobs to go to. Some have other commitments. I'll go into this, but there's lots of factors why it's difficult to try to get teachers all in the same place at the same time. Content, again, it's making the content relevant to the teachers. Sometimes something's really relevant to you, but not to the teachers. It's like the timetable. Organising the timetable is hard enough without trying to find a space when you can get everybody together. Students. What we've had is like, say a Monday and it's every Monday, but the students don't let teachers leave the classroom. They don't care that a meeting is actually really important. It has a good impact on their experience as a student. I just want to ask the teacher a question on my small talk or whatever it is. So students don't understand how important the meeting is. They just go, hey, I don't know, I won't ask, but some teachers have paid for meetings, some aren't, some schools do this, some don't. That's tricky. The most popular meetings I ever had were because we provided sandwiches. Then that budget was cut. The meetings were the same again. So I just found this, which I thought was quite interesting, because we've all got so much to say about meetings. I wanted to find some kind of parallel that might be useful, a useful kind of lens to which to attack the content of the meetings. So autonomy, when I looked at this idea, I thought it was quite interesting because autonomy, when I looked at this, I kind of like what went on because I can see where I've gone wrong sometimes. Autonomy, does teachers feel like they can actually, or is it just you barking things? Do they feel like what they say will actually be listened to and have an impact? Meaning is what you're saying. Or will they be able to immediately relate it? This is meaningful to me. Challenge. Does this have an impact on them? Are you giving them maybe a problem to help solve? Learning. Are they going to feel like, oh I've got any feedback, because I know that I can use. And feedback. Do you refer to previous meetings and give them like, I've actually taken part of what you said and I've taken action on it. You can now see that action. Or even within the meeting, giving each other feedback and scheduling and supporting. Scheduling, it's as simple as picking a regular time so I've found it really helped. Still, if it says the same thing every Monday, still won't work, people feel forgot because it's backed up a lot of things, but it's just something regular. I also thought if I could take a note while I was at the previous talks, so I'll go to these and discuss that. So how often, as often as makes sense every school is different. You know your context. Pick a frequency and stick to it. I also thought, I've mentioned provide food, but a selective agenda, try and put yourself in the teacher's shoes or even ask a senior teacher to say, listen, what's relevant and what isn't. I also thought of making some meetings voluntary. Now this worked. I did this once with the admin team. We needed to have meetings. Everybody is too busy to attend it but anyway, but not too often. But I said, okay, so let's say we'll have an admin meeting once a month, but let's do it for weeks anyway and whoever wants to turn up can, and that works really well, and it goes into autonomy. I also thought 10 people three times, whatever it is, tell them three times. The meeting is going to be next week. First time is the fact that we know that. The second time is put in my mouth. The third time is maybe when you're doing the role so it's beautiful to get people very busy. Supporting meetings. Most Irish language schools are rolling enrolments. I don't know if it's as common in the UK as it is here but loads happen. That is really relevant. Memos would be a good way to back it up but again, somebody said this earlier don't think that we should put a memo that people have read it and know it. But again, it's a good way to back it up without being too intrusive. So look, if you want, if you think it's relevant to you and the teachers who want to look at what they do, what they don't, don't or maybe just a reminder, like we said in the meeting that we've got to do this, this is a good thing to do then. A teacher FAQ page, it's kind of similar to somebody raised the issue of their handbook. Things like don't really change very often and I kind of pull all the things out of the handbook and put them on FAQ pages and see if funky web designer create a really cool FAQ page for us that work quite well because it's kind of quite interactive so that was nice. And of course for coven teachers, last minute teachers, teachers who are new actually don't tend to induct them properly. This is a good resource for them and I also put minutes to the meeting on the link in the bottom of that so people can access the minutes. A useful information that doesn't change. The minutes as well, I've just found nobody read that. I hate it. Of course very useful, but I had the meeting and then I didn't have time to write the minutes and it was weeks later. I was like, okay, there's a minute, do you all read it? No, because I'm really going to get you on time. So I actually asked a teacher to take the minutes and they took turns. Small change but actually really effective means at least one teacher is listening anyway. And notice boards again, kind of similar to the memo thing, just a useful backup. And if you're referring to the syllabus all the time then that's where the syllabus is kept, guys, so you don't have to troll through minutes of meetings. Everything has a place. And then, of course, I think what's really important is backing up what happens in meetings. Informal communication. Walking into it until people are on the corridor and I think it was Josh who said it to talk and manage by walking around. You've got one there? Everybody's saying it now after joining. So if you manage by walking around, it's a great phrase. Just telling people as you're going along backed up with other things as well because you're not going to bump into everybody. And also letting the teachers have space to communicate informally. I was just having a discussion with Mike over there about attending the coffee break with the teachers. My teachers wouldn't have liked that because it's the one chance they're all staying usually about me and that's okay, they needed that. They needed that chance to informally communicate with each other so that then they were kind of on a level playing field when they came into a meeting even if it was formed a consensus against something I was proposing. At least I had the chance to discuss that. It's all communication very important as well. Thank you very much. I've done it. Any questions? Thank you very much. Hi, I just wondered if you do provide space in the meeting for them to make that suggestion for the years and how did that work? It worked really well when we had sandwiches. It worked really well. I made a conscious decision when we stopped providing lunch because I know we were going to have short meetings and I did feel like I was just barking so much. So I kind of tried to have one meeting and I thought I was just barking so the next day I was very, very scared so that was the space and the whole thing like that. But I didn't quite get it. I didn't get it. I didn't get it. I didn't get it. I didn't like that but I didn't quite get it right in a way that I wouldn't like to. I've come across schools where the idea of the freelance doesn't go very well for meetings. In some schools where they say that when we really want the teachers to go we do provide freelance. It seems to work really well. You turned it to one thing I didn't mention on this but I found the location helps. If it was in a classroom they felt like they'd never left the classroom all morning. Or if it was a one-to-one meeting that's holding an important appraisal. I'd go off site so that I wasn't interrupted. Maybe just having your boss at some of the meetings just the director of the schools I can meet with is it a direct initiative to turn this around to this kind of location where it ends? OK, thank you very much.