HIGH-LEVERAGE PRACTICES IN General Education and Resource CLASSROOMS

Shared Goals, Shared Success:
Running Effective Student Meetings

Episode Description

In this episode, Heather sits down with Mary, a school principal and administrative coach, to talk about what it actually takes to organize and lead effective meetings—with families, with staff, and across teams. They talk about the moments when meetings feel like they’re going off the rails, and the habits that help bring people back to the shared purpose: doing right by students. Mary shares how her team makes space for every voice—from paraprofessionals and hall monitors to teachers and specialists—and why that’s made their meetings more useful, more honest, and more human. Whether you're leading IEPs or school improvement planning, this conversation is a reminder that the most effective meetings aren’t the ones with the fanciest agendas—they’re the ones where people feel heard, seen, and ready to work together.

Key Points and Takeaways

  • Ensuring that all relevant professionals, including paraprofessionals and support staff, are part of the meeting to provide comprehensive insights.
  • The critical role of having a well-prepared meeting agenda and clear goals for effective and productive meetings.
  • Techniques for fostering collaboration, including active listening, staying focused on the meeting’s goals, and ensuring all voices are heard.
  • The impact of a humble leadership approach, being open to admitting “I don’t know” and committing to follow-up, to build trust and consensus among team members.
  • The importance of pre-meeting discussions, strategic planning, and post-meeting debriefs to refine and improve the meeting processes continually.
Podcast Guest

Mary Mangione, MA

Mary Mangione is a coach for school building leaders specializing in creating specialized programming, restorative practices, trauma-invested schools, school-based mental health interventions, and multi-tiered systems of support. She has been a private tutor for students with special needs, special education teacher for ED/BD/Autism, mentor for a social services organization, substance abuse case manager, and assistant principal and principal of specialized and public alternative schools. Outside of her professional work, she enjoys traveling, eating great food, providing taxi services for her two sons, binging Netflix, and is an active yogi. Mary is an Administrative Coach for Building Leaders with her Bachelors in Fine Arts with an Emphasis in Graphic Design and Painting, Master of Arts in Special Education, and Master of Arts in Principal Leadership.
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High-Leverage Practice #2:
Organize and facilitate effective meetings with professionals and families

Teachers lead and participate in a range of meetings, (like meetings with families, individualized education program [IEP] teams, individualized family services plan [IFSP] teams, instructional planning), with the purpose of identifying clear, measurable student outcomes and developing instructional and behavioral plans that support these outcomes.

They develop a meeting agenda, allocate time to meet the goals of the agenda and lead in ways that encourage consensus building through positive verbal and nonverbal communication, encouraging the sharing of multiple perspectives, demonstrating active listening, and soliciting feedback for this high-leverage practice.

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And I often found that talking to our hall monitors, our hourly folks, they have a lot of insight. Oh, it’s because she told me that last weekend, right? That really moves the team along with problem solving and setting goals without spending so much time on being stuck.

Mary Mangione

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Host: Heather Volchko

Guest: Mary Mangione

For this High Leverage Practice today, we are talking about organizing and facilitating effective meetings with professionals and families. With me today, I have Mary. She is a school building principal and our administrative coach for building leaders. So, Mary, you do this all day, every day. What does it look like for you?

Hi, Heather. So, yeah, I mean, I think that the most important thing to consider when building collaborative teams is making sure that everyone is at the table. So it really depends on what the focus is or what the goal is for the meeting. I think that will kind of drive who needs to be there and what needs to be the focus and the discussion at the table, of course. And having those already prepared meeting agendas to keep the meeting going, I think is really crucial.

Now, that's super helpful, because, I mean, how many times have I walked into a meeting and even partway through the meeting, start wondering, like, wait, why are we here? What are we doing? Like, what is the goal? And then if it shifts and it's like, oh, well, shoot, now we don't even have the people at the table that we really need to actually make this an effective, productive conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. So oftentimes you start the meeting, you start talking about the student, and then you're like, oh, wait, but this person's not here to report on x, y, z. So making sure that every person who works with that student is at least at the table or at least has input, I think that's a really crucial part. Oftentimes, we don't include our paraprofessionals or even, like, our hallway folks, right? Like, hourly folks who have direct contact with our kids in a different way, maybe outside of the classroom, including those voices, and also helping them kind of work together, I think is crucial.

In my building, what we're trying to do is making sure that our hourly employees are included in all of the discussions because that also allows them to build relationships with our teachers, our social workers. And that way, it's coming from more of a team approach. And not just like, teachers are the ones who have the degree, therefore they can talk the talk, right? We all know that’s not always the case… So.

No, that's so good, because those are also typically the staff that know our students. They're the ones bumping into them in places outside of the classroom. Quite honestly, I've worked with some custodians and hall monitors, and they're better mentors. I mean, not only do they have more time in the day or their time is more flexible, they can be kind of leveraged in different ways.

There's just a different type of rapport that can happen with that different role. Where I've had students very resistant to any form of certified staff. It hasn't mattered if it's a teacher or a social worker, if it's a supporter in the classroom or what that looks like, but they're pretty resistant. You know, of course, a lot of my students that I work with, they've had some not great experiences with those folks, too, and so they're just kind of done and over it.

But these other folks that you're talking about, they fit this little gap that I believe is sort of just overlooked. So I love that you're actually leveraging them and bringing them in and kind of positioning them to be experts in their own right, honoring the expertise of the folks that have… they've got the degrees. They can talk the talk. They can do that kind of thing.

But there's so many different types of roles different types of people can play, and I love that you're noticing that and really maximizing that in your team. That's super cool.

Yeah. So when we think about students in a classroom setting, right? Depending on what their relationship is with that subject or that teacher, they might have a very different behavior in the classroom versus out in the hallway, where it's safe, where it's not content driven. So I see that often with students, it really depends on their relationship with the content of the teacher. You tend to just kind of open up and say things that you're like, hey, you're giving me too much information in the hallway. Like, I don't want to know all that.

Yeah.

So many times, I think that when we're in these problem solving teams or collaborative teams to work on next steps for students or meeting the short term and long term goals, we get to a point where we get stuck, right? Like, what do we do next? Why is this student exhibiting this behavior? I don't have enough evidence or data to kind of create next steps for the student.

And I often found that talking to our hall monitors, our hourly folks, they have a lot of insight. Oh, it's because she told me that last weekend, right? That really moves the team along with problem solving and setting goals without spending so much time on being stuck.

Yeah, no, that's so good. All voices, right? All voices. So as we're talking through who can be at the table, how do we set up this meeting so that it can be as effective as possible, what would not count as either being an organized meeting or maybe a meeting that's not facilitated effectively? I know they happen all the time, but for you, what would you say like, “that may appear organized, but it's really not. It's not effective in that way that we need it to be”?

Well, I think collaboration, the word collaboration, right? It's not something that just comes naturally. I think certain teams are highly effective because there's a lot of different things that go into collaborating about a student, right? There's a lot of egos involved. A lot of different titles are at the table. So oftentimes, I think, that someone needs to be able to facilitate and create those roles.

When we get stuck in a meeting about something that we don't agree on, I think it's really important to go back to whatever the vision or the compelling purpose is, to review that, to kind of start over. Otherwise, I've learned just in general that collaboration just doesn't come naturally. Just like, how running a meeting is not something that runs naturally. You really need to have a set agenda item, right?

Like beginning and an end and a middle in order to kind of tease out all the things that you need to tease out, because you know that you have a meeting and another meeting in 45 minutes that you need to run to. And in order to be able to have those collaborative discussions, those norms really need to be there.

You are doing these meetings all the time, and I know in your context, you have some very high stakes meetings that can really determine truly the future of a student, but you also have meetings where then you're sort of positioned to coach other buildings as they’re trying to figure out either what to do with a student that they still have or how to support a student who's preparing to return. I know you're just in the middle of some really high stakes conversations, so do you have any examples that you're thinking of that are like, “that meeting could have gone poorly, but some people pulled it together and we ended up with maybe even a different outcome than what we had anticipated”?

Yeah. So, I think those high stakes conversations happen when a parent and a student is present at the table and maybe not everyone is seeing eye to eye, or maybe we're not quite getting to the root of the goal of the meeting, and the conversation keeps veering off to the side instead of achieving the goal that we want to have. So, first things first, you kind of redirect everyone to say, this is our goal for the meeting.

But oftentimes I think, as educators, we don't know how to say, “I'm not sure” or “I don't know the answer to that. I'll have to look into that and get back to you.” There's like a real vulnerable piece to saying that you don't know, right? Because every situation is never going to be the same. Every situation is never going to be a cookie cutter, but I think just stating that out loud and saying that, “I'll have to look into it” just shows that I don't know everything, you know? And maybe not every team member who needs to be here is present right now, but we'll definitely get back to you on that. I think that gives the parents some peace of mind, too, that there's some sort of “we're working together” versus “it's my way or the highway”, “We can't be flexible with programming”, and whatnot. I've often found that examples like that have worked really well in teams and in meetings where there's definitely more trust that is built with the parents, too.

What you're referring to, though, is a very humble leadership style. You know, it is uncomfortable to say “I don't know”, and to do that in a way that can genuinely communicate, “and I will follow up”. It's not just, “oh, I don't know, we can't figure that out. And so we're going to use what we have now to make whatever decision needs to be made”, but instead to say, “you know what, I'm not sure, but let me figure that out. And we will get back together” and have families trust that that will actually happen.

How have you grown into that? That is such an uncommon leadership style. And you're right, it's so stinking effective, but it's not everywhere. So how did you get into that? To be able to be that kind of a leader in such high stakes conversations?

That's a really good question. You know, I always refer back to those really hard IEP meetings as a teacher. And I've worked with some really strong minded outside advocates where you really have to look at your IEP draft and kind of look at it and then give it to your principal, be like, “is there any feedback?”, anything that doesn't look right, before even sending a draft out to the advocate, right? I just remember feeling like nothing I was doing was right when I was at that stage of my career.

And I just remember the only thing that can, like, I don't know this advocate. She doesn't know me. And we're trying to build this relationship via email and also in this 1 hour IEP meeting and being vulnerable really does go a long way. There are some people, I think they come to a meeting and they immediately kind of have a wall up, like, “no, I can't do that”, or, “it's not what we do”. But I've always learned that if there is a need for a student that we can just try to put our heads together, be creative, and at that moment I don't have an answer, but I do know that I have a team of people I work with who maybe would have different ideas, and I'm going to bring that to the table, take the team approach and say, like, “well, I could bring that back to the team, I don't know right now.” Right?

And I've always found that that's very inviting from anyone who is kind of demanding of certain things in a meeting that creates this “Okay, you're open to it. You're going to look into it and converse with your team, and then let's see what we come up with.” Right? So all of a sudden now it's more of a collaborative team approach and not just like, “I'm not going to do that” or “I can't do that” or “we won't do that”.

Yeah, it's just such a really beautiful thing to hear you describe it this way. Because it's super vulnerable. It's incredibly effective, and it's so uncommon. But how have you walked your teams through that? How do you help other folks that are also feeling uncomfortable or uncertain or, I mean, like, you're even sharing, like, attacked at certain meetings or almost, like, called out non verbally. Right? Like, I've been in meetings where there's those side glances and you can feel the opinions of your colleagues even though no words are being said.

How have you walked your teams through being able to kind of mitigate that? And just, that's not part of our dynamic here. That's not how we operate. How did you join forces with all of these different kinds of people to get them to have a similar view?

Well, I think it has a lot to do with leading by example, right? So I think it's a lot of prep work, side discussions. If you know that you're walking into a meeting where it can be pretty litigious, for example, which is, you know, everyone's on high anxiety mode, I think as a team, you talk about it beforehand, right? And you kind of talk about what's our purpose here. We know what to expect. Let's go into it with a positive mindset that it's going to go well, but if it doesn't, who's going to take over?

Right? Oftentimes I do have to say, like, if this person asks this question or if the conversation goes this way sideways, then I'm taking over. Let me speak. Do not answer. I think that sometimes there's a responsibility of a leader to be able to kind of protect our people, but then talk about it afterwards to kind of recap what they could have done differently or what I could have done differently and make sure that they're feeling okay about it.

It takes a lot of time. You're talking about meeting before a meeting and then meeting after a meeting to debrief. And hopefully these situations aren't the norm, but we're talking about rare situations where high stake situations, and you really have to build your people up, talk about what we did right, what we didn't do right, how to prepare for the next meeting, how to strategically, like, where is the meeting happening?

Who's going to be in the meeting? Are there going to be a lot of people or less people? So having those discussions and just building your people up to make sure that they feel more confident in those situations, I think that's really crucial.

Yeah. Thank you so much for kind of letting us peek behind the magic curtain of all of the amazing work that you make happen with your people so that they can show up and be, you know, truly and genuinely themselves while also still doing what's right for kids. So thank you for sharing your expertise in this area.

Yeah, absolutely.

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There are some people, I think they come to a meeting and they immediately kind of have a wall up, like, “no, I can’t do that”, or, “it’s not what we do”. But I’ve always learned that if there is a need for a student that we can just try to put our heads together, be creative.

Mary Mangione

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One of the pivotal roles of special education teachers is orchestrating and guiding a diverse array of meetings, from the annual IEP gatherings to ongoing collaborative sessions, crucial for instructional planning and progress monitoring, these meetings are the heartbeat of student support and progress. Picture a room filled not just with parents and teachers, but also with general educators, specialists in reading and curriculum, principals, and sometimes even outside consultants, all united by a common goal: crafting the most possible educational journey for students with disabilities.

Under the mandate of I.D.E.A. , these meetings aren't just procedural. They're platforms where parents are empowered to actively shape their child's educational path. It's about ensuring that every voice is heard and valued equally. That every participant, including the students themselves, play a pivotal role in these pivotal discussions. To make these meetings effective requires a special set of skills: the ability to articulate the reasoning behind behavior intervention plans, to discuss effective educational practices, and most importantly, to foster consensus among a diverse group of stakeholders.

These skills aren't innate. They're honed through deliberate practice and mentorship.

Central to this process are the partnership principles: equality, choice, voice, reciprocity, praxis, and reflection. These aren't just ideals. They're guiding lights that help navigate the complexities of communication and decision making in these crucial forums. By embodying these principles, special education teachers not only facilitate smoother meetings, but also cultivate deeper, more meaningful relationships with family and colleagues alike.

In essence, organizing and facilitating these meetings isn't just a professional duty. It's a commitment enshrined in the code of ethics of the Council for Exceptional Children. It's about working collegially respecting each other's expertise and actively involving families in every step of the educational journey.

So, as we reflect on the art of facilitating these meetings, let us remember it's not just about what happens in the room. It's about the impact these discussions have on the lives and futures of the students we serve.

In the realm of special education, the role of the in the realm of special education, the role of the educator is multifaceted, with one crucial aspect being the ability to lead meetings with colleagues and families effectively. Special educators, given their expertise in practice, assessment, and decision making, are often tasked with steering these critical discussions, particularly during IEP meetings.

This responsibility highlights the need for exceptional organizational and communication skills. When a special educator is adept in learning meetings, it ensures clarity and accuracy, minimizing the risk of mistakes or misinformation. However, not all educators naturally excel in this area. For those who find these interactions challenging, it's reassuring to know that proficiency can be developed through dedication and practice. It's vital for instructors, mentors and collaborators to provide constructive feedback to novices, helping them build their skills in this essential domain. An effective special educator engages with colleagues (HLP1) and families (HLP3), bringing the right people to the table and fostering a collaborative atmosphere.

This high leverage practice, or HLP, also necessitates a solid grasp of additional SLPs within the assessment domain, four through six, ensuring that meetings are not only well organized, but also grounded in comprehensive, accurate assessments. Leading meetings effectively is a cornerstone of special education. With commitment and the right support, even those who initially struggle can become adept at this vital skill, ensuring that every meeting contributes positively to the educational journey of their students. Teachers who effectively lead meetings prepare for meetings and facilitate effective meetings.

Preparing for meetings. Let's talk about what makes a teacher truly effective at leading meetings.

It all starts with preparation. First off, setting a clear goal for the meeting is essential. This helps everyone focus on the priorities and ensures that key tasks are accomplished. Before you even get to the meeting, it's crucial to identify who needs to be there and find a time that works for everyone involved. Once you've nailed down the date, time, and location, communicate these details clearly to all team members along with the meeting agenda.

This way, everyone knows what to expect and can come prepared. Speaking of preparation, make sure to outline what each participant needs to bring to the table. For instance, if the meeting involves instructional decisions, let team members know in advance what specific data they should bring, such as assessment results, behavior checklists, or student files.

And let's not forget the first impressions. Ensure that the staff responsible for welcoming and guiding parents or families have excellent communication skills. A warm and professional greeting can set a positive tone for the entire meeting.

In essence, effective meeting leadership involves thorough preparation, clear communication, and a welcoming atmosphere, all of which contribute to a successful and productive meeting. 

Facilitate effective meetings. Leading effective meetings is a skill that can make a world of difference in special education.

Here's how to make it happen. Start by greeting everyone with a positive tone. It sets a collaborative atmosphere from the get go. Once everyone's settled, remind the team of the ground rules and review the agenda. If possible, have the agenda displayed for all to see throughout the meeting. This keeps everyone aligned and focused. Give team members a chance to introduce themselves.

It's a simple step, but it helps build rapport and ensures that everyone feels included. As the meeting progresses, encourage active discussion and ensure that everyone has an equal voice, especially parents. Use guiding questions and checklists to facilitate this process. Staying on track is key. Promote consensus building to keep conversations focused on the meeting's goals. This helps maintain efficiency and ensures that all relevant points are addressed.

Make sure everyone understands the student data being discussed. Clear comprehension of this data is crucial for effective instructional decision making. As the meeting wraps up, summarize the accomplishments, review student goals and plans, and schedule any necessary follow up meetings. Finally, outline any follow up actions needed after the meeting, such as coordinating with relative service providers.

This ensures that all tasks are completed and nothing falls through the cracks. An effective meeting leader fosters a positive environment, ensures clear communication, and keeps everyone engaged and focused. This approach not only makes meetings more productive, but also strengthens the collaborative effort to support our students.

When it comes to supporting teachers in their journey to become effective meeting leaders, school leaders play a crucial role. Here are some tips to help you guide and enhance their skills. First, assess each teacher's comfort level and expertise in running meetings. This helps identify who might need additional support and where to focus your efforts. 

Next, offer opportunities for novice teachers to observe skilled facilitators in action. Watching experienced professionals lead various types of meetings provides valuable insights and practical examples.

Additionally, provide targeted instruction on the skills required to lead effective meetings. This includes both the technical aspects like understanding IEP components, FBA steps and manifestations determinations and the interpersonal skills necessary to make participants feel comfortable and engaged.

Don't forget to offer constructive feedback on their performance. Highlight strengths, suggest improvements, and provide access to professional development opportunities tailored to their needs. In essence, supporting teachers involves a blend of evaluation, observation, targeted instruction, and ongoing feedback. By fostering these skills, you help ensure that every meeting is productive, collaborative, and geared toward achieving the best outcomes for students.

When we dive into the research on meetings involving professionals and families, we can examine it from two key effectiveness and social acceptability.

Although research on organizing and facilitating these meetings is somewhat limited, there's a consensus on several crucial elements that enhance their quality. First and foremost, having clear goals for the meeting, setting a structured agenda, and establishing clear expectations are all foundational to running an effective meeting.

Active listening and fostering genuine communication are not just niceties, they are essential practices that significantly boost the meeting's productivity. On the flip side, research on social acceptability often zeroes in on the satisfaction of team members and families. It highlights the value of adopting a partnership approach.

By actively involving both professionals and parents, we not only gather more meaningful input, but also ensure that our message is received positively. This approach enhances the overall effectiveness of the meetings, making them more collaborative and productive. In essence, combining clear objectives with a partnership focused approach helps bridge the gap between effectiveness and acceptability, leading to more successful and satisfying meetings for everyone involved.

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