Community Meetings

I finally completed both of my meetings for the class field work requirements. In one, I attended a football game several weeks ago, and then Tuesday after my full day observation, I attended a meeting for teachers in Newark Arts High School. The meetings are held every month over the course of a few days, and require all the teachers to attend at one of the meetings. They are named “PLCs” or “Professional Learning Communities”, and they were started about a year ago by the new principal at Arts High. Each meeting the teachers are given readings and documents prior to the meeting, and they are expected to read and come up with their own conclusions and be prepared to discuss what they discovered. Each meeting is about an hour long and contains a meeting objective as well as guiding questions that help guide the main issues to be discussed.

Every participant in the meeting is also given an opportunity to share.
In this particular meeting, the discussion was based on open-ended questions. The teachers and vice principal discussed what the definition of open-ended questions were, how “open” an open-ended question can be, what makes a question “open”, and when is it appropriate to ask open-ended questions. It may sound like the topic became monotonous; however there were a lot of ideas that the teachers shared that were very helpful. For example, one teacher shared that asking open-ended questions gives students the ability to share their thoughts with others, even if that student is generally very shy.