Another Meeting

This was a very different meeting. It included people from other schools and was designed to discuss the facilities we share and some of the issues that arise from it.
Not many decisions were made and most of the meeting was spent listening to the coordinator talk about the budget and future plans - something he could have quite easily sent out in an email. Boy, did he like the sound of his own voice!
Some observations during the meeting:

• It was all business.
• Seventeen people were present at the meeting and only six people spoke up. Of those six, four people, including the coordinator dominated the discussion. They were all senior, experienced teachers, mostly coordinators in the school.
• The meeting discussed the unsafe state of the labs., especially when numbers of students were big. The big four basically made statements about how we can lobby for action. Then the coordinator said "I presume that because people are not saying anything, that they agree with what we are saying here"!. A huge presumption

What it needs is more time in small, mixed groups where people can actually have a say in the issue not just making presumptions because people don't want to speak up. Again, this was not really a decision-making meeting but when a "decision" was made, the process was nonsense.