Beginning of Year Staff Meetings

I snapped this picture as I sat on my patio writing this post. The light was gorgeous. A rainy summer has kept everything lush and green and profoundly alive. I’d just been scrolling social media, which led me to today’s topic. It’s the time of year that Facebook groups of educators are on fire.

This is how it goes: Principals ask for tips on the back-to-school staff meeting. Colleagues give them some fun tips. Teachers jump in and say oh no please no icebreakers. Then other teachers jump in and say actually I love spending time with my colleagues and icebreakers are fun please do something don’t just make us sit there and listen to droning on about grade portals and safety drills.

Principals are confused. And anxious. They want to get it right, but there seems no way to fix this conundrum— to please everyone— to get.this.right.

Of course there’s no “right.” In a room full of ten, fifty, a hundred grown adults—all of whom bring opinions and experiences and some level of leadership chops— there is never going to be agreement on how best to run a beginning-of-year staff meeting. Ever.

How, then, do we overcome this quandary?

Think about this.

Know why some people resist. “Just give me time in my classroom,” say the resistors. “I don’t want to be sitting around singing Kumbaya with people I have to spend the next 180 days with.” Are these people just grumpy? Well, maybe. But it’s more likely they see icebreakers as overly naive, idealistic, or lacking in substance. They don’t want forced, superficial harmony. This isn’t an insult to you or your school; they want to get their work done and go home, go work out, go watch their kid play baseball, go to happy hour— whatever. They want to get on with things. I find simply accepting this “why” — free of judgment— really helps.

Decide if you’re going to do one— and then own it. I do brief icebreakers because it feels gross not to do something to welcome people back. I don’t want to say, “Hi, welcome back, hope you all had fun at the beach. Now let me show you the new duty schedule.” Instead, I want new staff to feel welcome and I want a slow acclimation back to collective collegiality. I don’t apologize or grovel to get their participation.

Make it applicable to their classrooms. I never do an icebreaker that doesn’t easily translate into an activity the teachers could do with their students. “You can put this into place tomorrow if you want,” I say. Many times, they do.

Let it reveal stories. You want your icebreaker to be an activity that opens dialogue between colleagues. Post-its, chart paper, paper plates with affirmations, “Minute to Win It”— all good tools, but does their use get people to reveal a little part of what makes them tick? That’s the question. The word 'breaker' aside, the point of an icebreaker is to connect people, not break them apart.

Make it simple— and inexpensive. A colleague from Michigan just spent $436 of her own money on supplies for a garden-themed activity in which everyone planted a flower that would, theoretically, grow in each person’s classroom throughout the year. Lovely idea. In practice, it was messy, took too long, and didn’t yield much except dirty hands, wilted geraniums, and a custodian who asked, “Do I have to water all these things every night?” Simplicity rarely costs money.

Make it short. A principal I know received a two-sentence email from a teacher who explicitly and pointedly asked that he skip their annual icebreaker. He was annoyed— how rude! How disrespectful! “What have you done in the past?” I asked, trying to discern what the teacher may be trying to eliminate.

“Well, we’ve done Amazing Race, we’ve done Survivor, we’ve done a Community Scavenger Hunt…”

My goodness, I asked. How long does it take?

“Oh,” he said, “I allocate a half day for it.”

I gulped. A half day, at a time of year when the to-do list is overwhelmingly long for teachers, is waaaaaaaaay too long. “Shorten it by about three hours,” I said. “Maybe more.” To me, an activity stretching longer than 30 minutes is probably twice as long as it should be.

Ask them for ideas. Most principals meet with a building leadership team before the full staff meeting. There’s an opportunity there. So, start with the ask— “We are going to do something fun to open the staff meeting. I want it to be collaborative, easy, quick, and something they can use on Day #1 with their students”— and gather their ideas. This approach is better than getting ideas on Facebook or Google because it will, at the very least, ensure there are others who share ownership and accountability in its success. Their investment will help take the load off of you. (Bonus points if someone else offers to actually lead the activity!)

One of my best meeting openers came this way. A teacher suggested we have everyone share one thing they will never do again. It was hilarious, somber, honest, fun. “Ride a roller coaster,” one teacher told her group, leading to a wonderful story about lost sunglasses and a week-long neck ache. “Ask my son to unload the dishwasher,” said the mother of a teenager who was testing her very limits of patience. “Wear a bra,” said another teacher who’d come out on the survivor side of a nasty battle with breast cancer. “Be on TV,” said another, whose mother had, forty years earlier, auditioned her for a baby food commercial, which led to a failed advertising campaign but did, at least, give her a 3-second sliver of time on television. “Drink,” I said, quietly acknowledging my eighth year without a drop of alcohol.

Remember: No one is going to be completely happy all the time. If we set our intentions— to have a little fun, get to know one another a little better, make it transferrable to the classroom, keep it short, keep it simple, keep it cheap, involve others— and set out to achieve only those things, our icebreaker might not be an eye roll but might kick off the year just right.

With the exception of spellcheck, all installments of Principal Problems are completely human-generated.