Mehak Siddiqui Teaching at a school can in many ways be different from working at an office – whether it’s the larger moral responsibility of shaping the younger generation or the lofty goal of making a difference in students’ lives rather than simply driving profits for the organization. There’s a common perception that because teachers work shorter hours and enjoy long holidays, their jobs are easier. But working with children is a unique responsibility that can be greatly helped or hindered by the dynamics playing out within the workplace. “Naturally, when people of varying viewpoints come together, there are bound to be differences that emerge. I think this makes gossip, conflict and scheming a ubiquitous part of staff room politics almost everywhere,” says Vimla*, who has served as principal at a well-established school in Ahmedabad for several years now. “The role of school leadership is to direct that in a positive way, to inculcate a culture of collaboration rather than competition, motivating teachers to focus on the larger goal of doing the best for our students,” she iterates. “Politics at the workplace was one of the reasons I decided to switch jobs,” says Anu*, a young teacher who graduated just two years ago. “I used to be at one of the most reputed international schools in Ahmedabad but I felt like most of my colleagues were just too negative and petty all the time. There was talk of teachers who were closer to the principal getting better appraisals. Older teachers who had been at the school a long time had an air of superiority and expected their opinion to matter more than newer voices like my own. Sometimes, even students were privy to the dynamics going on between staff members and I just didn’t think that was a healthy environment to work in! So even though I moved to a smaller school that doesn’t have the same level of prestige, I’m happy to have colleagues who are saner. I feel more valued as a part of the community here,” she recounts. Another young teacher, Shazia, teaches at a popular convent school in the same city and offers a different view, “There’s no escaping politics, no matter where you work so you have to take it in your stride. It’s a very subjective issue because there will always be some people who enjoy sitting around to gossip while others are focused on more productive things. I feel that to a certain extent you can choose what

Gopal Midha Faculty meetings were a part of my work life when I was a middle school math teacher in Mumbai. These faculty meetings would sometimes consist of sleep-inducing administrative affairs or endless debates on new school policies. Inevitably, as soon as the meeting ended, a few of us teachers would step out to the nearby café to refresh ourselves with filter coffee. Over coffee we made sense of the meeting, recounting what different participants said, guessing the backstory and then finally agreeing on how unproductive the meeting felt. It would have been more productive, we agreed, to spend the one hour spent in the meeting in preparing lesson plans and we blamed the principal for poor planning and not keeping the participants in tow. But blaming the principal was misplaced. Four years later,as a consultant, I worked with the same principal to plan faculty meetings. It was then that I found that the best laid plans of faculty meetings ended belly-up with teachers (and sometimes, the principal) giving the clock a forlorn look waiting for the meeting to end. The post-meeting now happened in the principal’s office where we tried to make sense of why, despite the detailed planning, the faculty meeting felt unproductive. If your experience of faculty meetings aligns with the above description, you are probably hoping for a solution that will transform your faculty meetings. This is not to say that you have not tried already. You might have tried good practices: shared an agenda upfront, conducted shorter meeting “huddles”,given roles to people (e.g., facilitator, note-keeper, time-keeper, chair) and felt more in control of what happens during the meeting. Most likely though, some faculty meetings would fall apart despite following all the good practices. Don’t despair. Faculty meetings are unwieldy mechanisms with a life of their own. And looking at them from a pure functional (tool) perspective is misplaced. Says Ed, the principal who Harry Wolcott shadowed for two years and described in his book, The Man in the Principal’s Office, “It always seems to take us an hour for the first item on the agenda, no matter what it is.” (Wolcott, 1973, p. 95). When I usually read out the above comment by Ed, I notice smiles and nods of acknowledgement from not just principals but even teachers and scholars of “meetings”. Indeed, the scholarly work on meetings as a research topic is rapidly gaining momentum. It was in the 1980s that Helen Schwartzman’s classic text, The Meeting: Gatherings in