Want To Give Meetings a Boost? Experiment With New Formats

This post was written by Gwen Pescatore, a PTO president, mom of three, and comoderator of  #PTchat. 

A few years ago our board realized the same handful of people came to our parent group meetings at Knapp Elementary. But it wasn’t the head count that concerned us. We wanted to make sure our meetings were truly helpful, so we decided to evaluate our meeting content and make changes if necessary.

Our team looked at the information being shared and realized we were essentially reviewing what had happened in the month since the last meeting, giving parents information they had already heard about in conversations, in our newsletter, and on our social media sites. At the end of our meetings, families left knowing little more than when they arrived.

We decided we needed to give parents better reasons to show up. So we created a new meeting format. Each meeting runs about one hour and has four segments: tech training, educator’s voice, student’s voice, and PTO business. We also try to stay flexible. If we have a great student visitor on the schedule, we might not do tech training or an educator visit that evening. Here is the basic format:

• Tech training: This is a short overview or demonstration of something like Twitter to help parents get a basic understanding of online tools. It’s intended to give parents enough information that they’d be interested in exploring the technology on their own. These sessions can be led by a student, teacher, or parent.

• Educator’s voice: This is the “expert” piece and is designed to give useful information on a variety of education topics. We’ve hosted our teachers, educators from our community, and virtual visitors on Skype. Often the information shared is topical and may be a way to clarify a misconception. This segment has been generating lots of interest, and we feel we are becoming a true resource to our families. 

• Student voice: Parents love seeing students in action. Each month, we invite a few students to discuss or demonstrate what they're doing in classes and clubs. We’ve had everything from a demonstration on how to reduce energy usage to a song performed in American Sign Language from our Sign Language Club. These presentations help keep meetings more positive. 

• PTO business: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s usually our shortest segment and includes a quick review of old business as needed and announcements for upcoming events. Even though we keep it short, we try to get feedback on upcoming decisions and share how earlier feedback impacted current decisions and events.

For those interested in this type of format, we’d recommend that you keep it flexible and get a feel for what fits best with your community. Now that we are in our second year with this new approach, we can say that we do have new faces at our meetings. But more important, we believe our parents are connecting, learning new things, and getting great resources.