The Board Meeting That Ended on Time.
Picture an October board meeting. The agenda is full: the audit, an enrollment update, a facilities question that arrived by email two days ago. Trustees ask good questions. The head answers them. Everyone leaves on time, and almost no one leaves having thought about where the school is headed.
As a head, I sat at the table for meetings like that. Nobody in the room was doing anything wrong. We were responding to what was in front of us.
In my coaching training through ACT Leadership and Brown University, we worked with a model that traces a leader’s journey from reactive to creative. A reactive leader responds to what arrives. A creative leader decides what matters and builds toward it. I’ve come to believe boards make the same journey, and that a head and board chair have more say over it than they might think.
Start with the agenda. Teachers know backward design: begin with what you want students to understand by June, then plan the units that get them there. A board’s year can work the same way. If the head and chair name, in late summer, the two or three questions the board must be ready to answer by spring, each meeting can carry one piece of that thinking. The audit still gets its time. So does the enrollment report. But the board is also building toward something, and trustees can feel the difference.
Then widen what trustees see. Most trustees first knew the school as parents. They saw it through one child’s classroom, one carpool line, one set of teachers. A board seat doesn’t erase that view; it sits on top of it. The creative move is to give trustees new ways to see the school, so their judgment rests on more than one family’s experience.
The ways in can be simple. A coffee or meal with the head a few times a year, with no agenda but the school. An invitation to the employee years-of-service celebration, or to a monthly faculty and staff coffee, where trustees meet the adults who carry the school every day. A visit on an ordinary school day, not a showcase. A few minutes at each board meeting to feature two or three trustees, so colleagues learn who is sitting beside them. A faculty and staff wellness program where trustees can offer an event or a service of their own, a thank-you that doesn’t pass through a budget line.
None of this is expensive. Each one asks a trustee to step out of the parent role for an hour and into the role of steward. Over a year, those hours add up to a board that knows the school more fully, trusts its head more readily, and spends its meeting time on questions only a board can answer.
A reactive board is not a bad board, just a busy one where today’s demands crowd out tomorrow’s questions. The shift to creative comes from design: an agenda with an arc, and a steady set of opportunities to see the whole school.
If you are a head or a board chair heading into winter meetings, here is a question to sit with: what does your board need to understand by June, and where in this year’s agenda will it learn it?
