Respecting your audience, and Rule 1 of teaching

Rule 1: Never condescend, nor even give the appearance of condescension.

I've had to watch a bunch of videos and zoom sessions already, with more to come, as we prepare for the school year.  These have been / probably will be valuable, in the sense of promoting discussion among faculty, of communicating necessary information to students and faculty.  So far, sessions have been respectful of my time - no one is reading powerpoints at the attendees, for example.  It's been good.

Today's presenter - who turned out to be pretty danged awesome - nevertheless turned me off from the beginning.  

While people were joining the zoom session, the presenter had already shared his screen which included five bullet points:

• Try to be as present as possible
• Remove distractions if possible
• Get a beverage
• Get note-taking items
• Prepare to participate

Wait, Greg, aren't these reasonable cultural expectations for attendees at a zoom presentation?

Of course they are.  That's not the issue.

By telling us that which any professional educator should already know, the presenter communicated to me a sense of distrust.  "I know you naughty teachers will not pay appropriate attention to our meeting..."  

The presenter further communicated a hubris about their own power and influence.  "...but if I give you specific rules about how I expect you to pay attention, then presto, you teachers will follow these rules and pay attention.  Perhaps you just authentically didn't know that you should pay attention in a meeting, so I'm relieving you of your ignorance.  Or, perhaps you will sigh and say 'aww, man, I was planning on playing Candy Crush for the next few hours, but dammit, these are the rules, so I'd better go get my note-taking items."

Greg, you talk about culture building... doesn't culture building start with a foundation of what the interaction rules are?

Culture does begin with a foundation of shared expectations.  For our boarding students, most of whom are new or new-ish to living away from home with other teenagers, we start by discussing specifics about how a dorm community should function.  If I were teaching third grade, I would likely begin the year with an open discussion of how we should behave toward one another.  

However... culture building also considers the audience.  The audience for my physics classes are 14-18 year old students who have been in school for many, many years.  The audience for faculty meetings is a room of professional teachers - if they don't know that during a meeting they should "try to be as present as possible," then, well, they shouldn't have been hired in the first place.

Greg, you also know that in a typical meeting a quarter of the faculty are, in fact, playing candy crush.  Or possibly pac-man.

Quite possible.  There are but two effective remedies for this: (1) Make the meeting so worthwhile that most attendees forget about video games and focus, by choice.  Make the audience want to be attentive.  (2) Find one or two people who are blatantly disengaged, and have a conversation with them.  Do they want to be a part of the faculty, or not?  

These are the same remedies, by the way, that I recommend if you have similar issues with students during your class. 

Unfortunately, today's presenter chose ineffective and maddening option (3): give the audience perky-toned yet condescending "rules" for the meeting.  A commonly-used equivalent is the all-faculty email reminding everyone how meetings are important and we should make an effort to focus.  The candy crush players don't change their behavior in response to option (3).  

Rules do nothing but irritate the professionals.  And that was our first impression of the presenter.  He had a mountain to climb to win me over.

Now, I'll be fair to this presenter - he did win me over.  His 90-minute meeting was fantastic, to the extent that when he stopped I said "oh, wow, that was short, he could've gone on longer." How I feel at the end is a major way that I judge any performance.  So this presenter passed with flying colors.

But he could have made things so much easier on himself.  And, how many other folks in the meeting did he lose just by implicitly questioning their professionalism?