A meeting is a meeting

Today there was an all staff meeting. As I listened to the discussion, I noticed that there are a lot of similarities in the meetings here with our faculty meetings at UK. There is an agenda that looks quite reasonable and it is assumed that the meeting will end on time. However, somewhere along the way, the discussion gets out of hand and the meeting goes on longer than planned.

Interestingly, the majority of the conversation was the annual meeting debriefing. I noted that faculty evaluations of meetings have a lot of similarities to our own student course evaluations. Those who have something good to say are usually quiet and those who have complaints, often about a single incident, are quite vocal. In many cases, half of the respondents complain about something that the other half of those surveyed really liked--living proof that you cannot please "all of the people all of the time." It is hard to focus on the bigger picture and the overall themes that come through in the evaluations without getting bogged down in detail. And it is even more difficult not to take the comments personally.

I remember that my favorite critical comment from a student evaluation went something like this - "I don't know what Dr P does for this class. She has her rotation students do all her work." This comment referred to an audience response exercise that I had the students prepare and use in class. We probably worked 4-6 hours on the exercise (about twice the time I would have spent if I did it by myself). Something went wrong during the hour because the students changed a question and forgot to rekey the answer. Out of approximately 45 class meetings, 90% of the comments referred to this day.

When the staff explained why some of the decisions were made in planning the meeting in Boston, it was easy to see that there are a lot of factors involved in planning the meeting that attendees do not see. As always, lack of communication leads to complaints and conflict. We experience the same thing in the classroom. It all looks so easy to the students who don't understand what went in to the preparation for just one class session. I guess we all need to be a little more tolerant when dealing with issues outside of our own expertise--or at least ask why before complaining.