Key takeaways
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When all teacher meetings support the same instructional goal, rather than competing priorities, the purpose is clear, and time feels well spent.
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Trust in leadership, not buy-in to initiatives, is more effective at keeping teachers committed to the work that happens between teacher meetings.
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When school leaders participate alongside teachers and make space for teacher leadership, teacher meetings become spaces where problems are solved together.
When Everyone Is Swimming in a Different Direction
Picture a school of fish swimming in the same direction. The image often represents teamwork and common purpose. In schools, however, getting everyone to move forward together is more complex. Teachers have different roles, face different pressures, and prioritize different efforts. Everyone works hard, but not always together. The result is not a school swimming smoothly together, but a collection of individual fish navigating their own currents.
It’s not always obvious when a school isn’t working together. Meetings have full agendas, slides are shared, and notes are taken. Everyone is busy. But efforts are scattered, not because teachers aren’t committed, but because their work isn’t anchored to a common goal. Left unaddressed, this lack of alignment could damage, or even undo, much of the good work.
One way for school leaders to address this problem is to rethink the purpose of teacher meetings. Meetings should be a tool, an educational resource, not simply a procedure. No matter who attends or when they happen, every meeting should support the same instructional goal. It is up to the school leader to create coherence across the school. With coherence, focus improves and progress compounds.
The good news is that with five intentional moves, school-wide coherence and steady progress are entirely possible.
1. Anchor Every Meeting to One Shared Instructional Goal
Schools rarely lack effort. More often than not, they are struggling to keep up with too many priorities at once. At any given time, there should be one clear instructional priority for the whole school. Principals can set the priority after reviewing student data, seeking staff input, or aligning with district goals. They might decide that the priority should be improving literacy, embedding social-emotional learning, or strengthening STEM education; regardless, it should be narrowed to a single instructional goal. Once the priority is set, every meeting and decision should support it, including every school principal meeting with teachers focused on instructional practice.
One of the fastest ways teacher meetings lose credibility is when they feel disconnected from each other or from teachers’ daily work with students. When a single school-wide priority is set, teachers can see how meeting time connects the bigger picture to their daily work with students.
There is no shortage of scheduled meetings in a school building: faculty meetings, leadership team meetings, department meetings, grade-level team meetings, data team meetings, interventionist team meetings, crisis team meetings, and professional learning meetings. But when they all support the same goal, accountability feels shared. It stops feeling like “my thing” or “your thing” and becomes our work. Co-teachers and teachers outside core content areas no longer wonder how the work connects to them. They can see their place in it. Every adult in the building, regardless of role, understands how their daily work supports the school-wide goal. And when this happens, meetings feel like a meaningful way to advance the shared priority.
2. Be Intentional about Who Is at the Table
Once the schoolwide priority is clear, school leaders should decide who needs to be at the table to move the work forward. Sometimes this means bringing the entire faculty together to build collective understanding. More often, though, it means bringing small teams together to work toward the shared goal in specialized ways. Relevance is key. When teachers know why they are in the meeting, whether it is a team meeting or a principal meeting with teachers, the conversation changes.
Productive teacher meetings are planned around the people whose insight, expertise, and viewpoints are needed. Once school leaders know who should attend, they should build schedules that support this vision. For example, schedules can be built so departments can review data together, grade-level teams can make intervention decisions together, and co-teachers can plan together.
Being intentional about who is at the table also means respecting the clock. A school leader should start and end meetings as planned and meet in person only when necessary. Items like announcements, data reports, and policy updates should be shared in advance, outside of meetings, so meeting time is reserved for work that is best done in person. Over time, these habits show teachers that their time and expertise are respected.
3. Show Up and Do the Work Alongside Teachers
Nothing signals to teachers whether a meeting is important faster than the principal’s body language. Is the principal giving top-down directives and then stepping away from the work? Is the principal taking part in the conversation, asking real questions, and working through issues with the team? Or is the principal responding to emails on a laptop in the back of the room? When principals are fully engaged, it shows that the work matters.
To support productive meetings, school leaders should rethink how they participate. They should not be passive observers in the back of the room, nor do they always need to take the lead. Instead, they should sit among the team, ask questions, and help solve problems. They should be open about what is uncertain, acknowledge challenges, and admit when something needs to change. Meetings should be where leaders and teachers roll up their sleeves and work through real problems and solutions together.
4. Replace Buy-In With Trust
In schools, there is a lot of emphasis on buy-in. Leaders say they need it, and they sometimes hold meetings just to get it. But buy-in is about persuasion, and that isn’t enough. It suggests that staff will eventually get on board if leaders explain things clearly enough. Trust, on the other hand, is a stronger foundation. It isn’t built in a single meeting or through a single slide deck. Trust grows slowly through consistency and transparency, both during and between meetings.
If a topic comes up in a meeting and comes up again in other meetings, hallway conversations, or walkthroughs, teachers notice. For example, a principal meeting with teachers that revisits the same topic over time signals that the work is important. Meetings feel more meaningful when teachers see that what they talk about during meetings matters between meetings, too.
Trust also comes from being open. School leaders should name the real challenges, such as not having enough time, being stretched too thin, or facing decisions beyond the school’s control. Teachers sense these issues anyway, and ignoring the elephant in the room to try to secure buy-in diminishes trust. Teachers don’t have to agree with every decision, but they do want to know why decisions are made. That kind of trust is what makes teachers invested in the work after the meeting is over.
5. Build Shared Leadership Capacity
Effective meetings cannot depend solely on the principal. Every school has teachers who ask the questions others are thinking, help colleagues get unstuck, or make complicated ideas easier to understand. Strong leaders notice these leadership strengths and make space for them in meetings.
There are many ways to build shared leadership. A school might rotate the role of meeting facilitator. Teachers might help shape the meeting agenda by adding topics that matter to them. A principal might ask a teacher who leads discussions well to run part of a meeting. Or a school leader might ask someone who explains ideas clearly to summarize at the end of a meeting. When leadership is shared, responsibility for the work feels shared, too.
Shared responsibility also means that leaders ask for and respond to feedback. Feedback can be collected through a short survey or a quick debrief after a meeting. What matters most is that leaders share with the team what they heard and explain the next steps. When teachers see that their suggestions are taken seriously, they are more likely to take on leadership roles and share in the responsibility for the work.
The best meetings are not about charisma or control. Productive, purposeful meetings are built on clear goals, trust, and joint responsibility. When these tenets are in place, meetings feel necessary and help the whole school move forward.
