Do you have any ideas for faculty meetings for a new science department chairperson? I’m sure I can handle most of the responsibilities, but I’m terrified of leading meetings. —S., Indiana

Facilitating a meeting is not unlike teaching a class, so apply your classroom management strategies to “meeting management.”

• Send out an agenda prior to the meeting. Attach information items so the meeting time can be spent on more productive and interesting topics.
• Be respectful of time. Give people a few minutes to tidy up their classrooms, but start and end the meeting at the designated times.
• Stick to the agenda but be flexible enough to accommodate any great discussions.
• Set aside a few minutes to recognize new issues or other concerns. Celebrate any teacher successes or accomplishments, too.
• Snacks/treats might be appreciated at the end of a long day.
• Send meeting minutes to all members of the department and keep the principal in the loop.

You could also use a “flipped classroom” strategy. For your meeting topic, send out readings or links to video segments to watch prior to the meeting. (The NSTA journals and web resources would be good sources.) Your meeting can focus on active discussion, decision-making, or teacher reflection related to these topics. Teachers can use the meeting time to work collaboratively on tasks that they would otherwise have to do on their own.

As a new chairperson, you may run into resistance from teachers who are used to the old ways. Participating in discussions or group activities may take some getting used to. If meetings previously were seen as a waste of time, you may have to be persistent to demonstrate that things are going to be better. And they will!

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/2987926396/

Two-years-olds may be too young to remember the seasonal changes that happened in the last year but they are not too young to understand and talk about the natural changes that happen on a shorter time scale—the cycle of day and night. Looking for the Moon can be a nighttime or daytime activity. Older children remember events that occur seasonally—leaves dropping from deciduous trees or the occasionally heavy snow that closed school and made new play opportunities in their familiar landscape. All ages are affected by regional changes such as annual flooding, summertime dry spells, and changes in animal behavior. Hunting seasons are tied to annual animal lifecycles. 

Migration of animals such as toads and bears are the focus of community efforts to make residents aware of the seasonal changes in animal activity. In some regions, all are fascinated and sometimes freaked out by the appearance of a large number of cicadas, an insect that has a life cycle that for some species takes more than a decade. Regional experts, such as naturalist Alonso Abugattas, can help us make sense of changes we don’t understand. 

Those occasional events are memorable. Observation and documentation are strategies that help children (and scientists) make sense of the everyday and occasional changes in their environment (NGSS practices). Children can make simple documentation of the daily weather and relate it to the seasonal cycles that affect living organisms. If your children are recording the daily temperature in relative or standard measurement, they can look back and see how many days with “hot” temperatures occurred before their pea seeds sprouted, cicadas emerged, or the swimming pools opened.

Children who are not yet reading numerals or able to count the small marks on a thermometer can read the colors on a thermometer with color-coded groups of 10-20 degrees of temperature. They can hold a cloud chart against the sky to match cloud types or collect and measure precipitation. A class’ daily “weather report” of sunny/cloudy/rainy/windy/snowy becomes much more meaningful when their sky cover and temperature data from the year is displayed so children can see patterns and relate changes in weather to changes in the life cycles of the plants and animals in their neighborhood. Early childhood educators are discussing weather education in the NSTA Learning Center Early Childhood Forum, one place to learn how to extend children’s understanding of the relationship between daily weather and seasons, and how those changes affect living organisms.