Please stand by for realtime captions. >> Thank you for joining us today. What's your addenda, how to craft meaningful agendas. We are facilitating today's event. Before we begin I'm going to provide you with an overview of the webinar platform. And let you know how you can interact. In the middle of the captioning pod is a materials box. You can find all the documents in this box and a new browser window will open, once you confirm your download will begin. To the right of the PowerPoint is a chat box. Please enter any questions you may have for the presenter in the chat. There will be a few discussion questions. We will ask you to respond via the chat box. If you have any technical or audio issues please click on the help button at the top right of your screen and select troubleshooting. This will test your Internet and system to make sure everything is compatible. Thank you for your attention. I will now turn it over to the presenter. >> This is Breanne Smith. I want to welcome you all to the webinar. We think it's important to have the webinar because of how important agendas are to our events in terms of prepping faculty and staff, coordinating your meeting logistics, and we also, for TA providers, specifically under OVW think it's important to work with your program specialist on finalizing your agenda in terms of the comforts request forms. I want to turn it over to Jennifer White the program director for curricular development. >> Thank you. Hello, it is great to be here with you today. I am here on behalf of the TA to TA grant but also on behalf of the Institute for leadership in education development. Is a project that is supported by the office on violence against women. My name is Jennifer White and I am the program director for curriculum development program design. In that role I write a lot of agendas. We are going to spend some time today talking about processes you can use to really think through what you want in your agenda so they are as meaningful as possible. Before we do that I'm going to go through our objective. As a result of this session, you will be better able to: follow a process to craft agendas that are based on real need and rooted in objectives. Identify the value of drafting agendas all of your meetings and workshops. And, utilize the agenda development worksheet. You will see down below in the pod that says materials that there are four handouts, I think there are three. You can use these to help you with the process. The one that is most important for you to be able to reference today is the agenda development tool. There are also two other handouts we have created for our project, one is a handout on how to write learning objectives. One is a handout on how to do a needs assessment. A needs assessment is basically a process for thinking through what the needs are of a group of learners. What your learning needs are your topic needs are for a meeting so to speak. Those are the three handouts. The one we are going to reference actively today in this webinar is the agenda development tool. I will also have screenshots of that on the slide deck here, so if you can't for some reason open the agenda development worksheet tool, while we are on the phone, then you can always look at it later and reference the picture we have on the slide. We have a relatively small group today. I am curious, before we get really deep into the content, to know if any of you on today have been to an island program. If you can take a look at the top of your screen, there is a little guy with his hand raised and you can click on the arrow to answer. You can raise your hand or hit agree if you have been to a I-LED workshop. Institute for Leadership in Education Development. Just curious if folks have participated. We have four different workshops that we do. We have the curriculum development workshop, you have faculty development workshop, we have eight facilitation skills workshop, and a distance learning workshop. Curious if any of you have been to any. I see a couple of people raising their hands. Two evil. -- Two people. It looks like two. I would love to see you, many of you in person at one of our upcoming workshops, the reason I raise that is because if you attend a I-LED , one of the things you will hear is a lot of talk around the processes for designing education or designing meetings. We spend a lot of time thinking through, how do we really think about what we need to accomplish in the meeting? Or a workshop? What are the needs and what are our object is. When we are either having a meeting or a conference. That is some of what we do at I-LED. That is some of what we're going to do here today. To start that off we are going to do a poll question. The first question is do you use any process for developing a meeting or conference agenda? Either one. Watching the poll results, it's interesting because I expected for more people to say they don't have a process for developing meeting or conference agendas. I am happy to see that about half of you are saying you do. Does anyone want to -- anyone who said they do have a process -- want to write into the chat box anything about that process? What it looks like? See a couple of folks typing. We will pause for a second. See if folks have comments on what kind of process they use to develop an agenda. I always use the previous meetings minutes so anything outstanding is addressed and of course standing puppets -- topics. Marie wrote similarly that revisiting prior agendas also working together with the team to design the agenda. That is great. I will touch on that in a minute about this idea of working collaboratively. Items from the parking lot. I think that means things that were not addressed at the last meeting probably. I send out an agenda asking others to send what they would like to see added. Great. From Denise. I see people writing. For visiting prior agendas, I have a process I am not sure the original was well thought out or have a process. Okay. Revisiting prior agendas. Adding meeting notes to last agendas. For the same sort of idea of keeping track of things that were covered and not covered. Okay. Most of us will write agendas for events such as conferences. If you have a three day conference he will probably write an agenda. You have multiple sessions, if you have multiple faculty participating, you are probably going to have some kind of an agenda. But a lot of times for shorter meetings or smaller meetings for less people or internal meetings we don't really do that as much. Which brings me to my next poll question, I will have you weigh in on this. For instance, do you write agendas for meetings with your OVW program manager? Alicia, I think we have a poll question for that as well? Thank you. You can hit yes or no. Do you write agendas for meetings with your OVW program manager? Some are saying yes in the chat. Q. -- Thank you. I am seeing a couple of comments about not having an OVW program manager. What I mean by that is for folks who are funded through the office of violence against women typically have a person at the office of violence against women that would be managing your grant. If you don't have someone like that Inc. about if you have a funder or just think about meetings with a supervisor, is that a situation where you would create an agenda? The poll is closed so people can just write in yes or no. No. Okay. A couple of yeses. One no. I would invite you to think about writing agendas for all your meetings, large or small, short or long. It's for a few reasons. First it's to prepare yourself. A sickly it is helpful I have found in many years of creating agendas for big workshops but also for important meetings with funders or supervisors or board members, it's important to sit and be intentional about what the needs are you have for the meeting and to write objectives for how to accomplish them. To have a process to think through what you really want to achieve. Is important because your time is precious. We don't really want to waste our own time, we don't want to waste other people's time. If we sit and think about what we really need to get out of meetings, I can guarantee you will have a more productive meeting and you will walk out of there, instead of feeling like, great, we spent another two hours of our time, our work day in a meeting that went nowhere, instead you can think, we've got a lot accomplished. We have met the objectives for what we were trying to do. The other reason is to prepare people who are coming. One of you mentioned you will send out your agenda in advance. That is a great practice to have. Write your agenda and send it to folks who are going to be at your meeting. Why? Because if it is a type of thing where people don't necessarily have to be at the meeting, maybe they see your agenda and realize, I am not the right person for this meeting, I should send my program specialist, I should send my executive director, that kind of thing. Or maybe it's so people can weigh in on the subject matter and say, I think we should also cover XYZ topic or I think we should spend more time on such and such a topic. In addition to that, it's helpful to craft an agenda to memorialize conversations you have had or you are intending to have an decisions you are going to be making. Part of that is again, when we think about conversations with a funder, like the office of violence against women or with people internally like board members or other staff or supervisors, is important for us to keep careful track of the conversations we are having, businesses we are making around our work. It could also be helpful for when you go back and start to do grant reporting. You have progress reports and things you have to complete on a regular basis. Agendas help you to stay on task and on time. We already mentioned this, the idea of getting approval feedback. And Breanne mentioned at the beginning, the idea around conference approval forms. Or the CAF. For those of us who are funded through The Office of Violence against Women and do trainings, we are often in the business of creating the conference approval form. Raise your hand if you have ever created or had to submit a conference approval form. Use the little guy at the top. Okay. That is something a lot of people have in common. I saw a bunch of hands go up. The conference approval form, for those of you who have not done it, is a pretty in-depth form you have to fill out several months before you have any kind of in person training event. It is really important, this is something I have talked to OVW about as well as even within my own organization, to think through your agenda very carefully before you submit a conference approval form. One of the things you need for a conference approval form is the agenda. But sometimes we are doing it so far in advance that we think, I don't really know exactly what the agenda is going to look like for this event I am having in six months. I have a vague idea, of what is going to be at the meeting, I will just throw together in the agenda. The trouble with that is you can't really critically create a picture of what is going to happen at that workshop or that meeting without really going through the agenda. That should really be the first thing you do before you fill out the conference approval form. So many of the items in your conference approval form are dependent on the agenda. Things like allotting for any consultants, faculty you're going to have. How long are you going to have the meeting for? Two days or 2.5 days? What kind of setup are you going to need? How will you know you are going to need to budget for for instance, recount rooms, if you haven't done a detailed agenda? The other pitfall of not really thinking through your agenda in advance of submitting a conference approval form that you may get approved for your meeting or workshop based on the agenda you submit, and then when it comes time to actually have your event your agenda looks different. That is not something that is really -- it's not something that The Office of Violence Against Women is fond of. And agenda that looks drastically different by the time you have an event. You may have to submit it again and have conversations around this. Is important to think through in advance what you really want to say. Okay. In the beginning of the webinar I mentioned that we have a worksheet that is called the agenda development worksheet. That is something I created under our I-LED project to help people think through a process for creating agendas. You will see right here at the top of the agenda development worksheet that there is some room to write down the name of your program or meeting. What the date is. Is it going to be something that is in person, something on a webinar, or on the phone? Who is your audience? And is it formal or informal? That is all basic logistic type information. The first real substantive thing to think about is, what is the goal of your meeting? Before we talk about that let's think about what I even need -- mean by a goal. We have here a little cloud bubble or thought bubble on our agenda development worksheet. It says, goal of meeting. The word goal has go underlined. It means where are you trying to go, what are you trying to achieve? What is the purpose of the meeting, what is the big picture of this particular event that you're holding? Both can be broad, they can be general, you don't have to be specific. They are general intentions toward the attainment of something. They can be aspirational. As an example I might say, I want to lose 20 pounds. That is my goal. I don't really need to define when or where or how, I just know that's what I want to do and that is my goal. When we are thinking about our meeting, initially we should have a big picture goal and that should be the first thing we think about when we are designing our agenda. The second part is probably the most important part of this whole process. This process, I'm going to add, is very similar to the process we use at I-LED to design curriculum. It is an abbreviated process because it is for meetings, a short term endeavor. It is very similar to the steps we use when we design curriculum. That could be for a one day training program or a five day training program. It is a similar process. When you figure out what your goal is, the next step is to really think about what are the topics or items that must be addressed to meet the goal? As an example, let's decide for the purposes of our webinar today that your goal, you're going to have a meeting and the goal is to make sure we meet with our funder, our program manager at OVW and for those of you who said you don't have a program manager, think then of someone who is in a decision-making role over some of your work. Whether that be a supervisor or a funder. Let's say we are going to have a meeting with our OVW program manager to discuss and outline our grant deliverable for a new grant that we just received. We will imagine that we have a brand-new grant we were given from the office -- The Office of Violence Against Women and we need to discuss and outline on what we have to do for this grant. What are our deliverables. Assuming you have to do that, to discuss an outline of a brand-new grant, with your program manager, what topics or items do you think you might need to cover? Let's throw some out there. Use the chat and name some topics or items you might want to discuss in that type of a meeting. Timeline. Michelle is saying timeline, budget and goals. Great suggestions. Anyone else? Anything you want to cover in a meeting where you're talking about deliverables with your funder or supervisor? Purpose of using the grant, okay. Thank you. Angela is typing. Housekeeping items. When, how, where and why. Definitely. Success stories from past. These are some great suggestions. Some of these we will cover. There are entries in the worksheet we can cover some of these items. Looking forward to the next grant cycle. Great. Yes, these are all things you might want to list as topics or items that must be addressed to meet your goal of outlining your deliverables for the two-year grant. One of the items that were suggested right away I Michelle was timeline. We are going to keep timeline in mind as we proceed through this process. Going to refer back throughout the process to timeline. Now we want to do is to write the objective. Objectives are a little different than goals but they are often used interchangeably. You will often hear people say, what are my goals and objectives? They think they are referring to the same thing. I think they are little different. To help remember the distinction between objectives and goals, I often mention the word objective has the word object in it. That means that it is specific. It is concrete, I can object, something you can hold in your hand. Objectives are specific, statements that are measurable, they should be statements of something that is achievable, and relevant and they should be able to be completed within a certain time. Time oriented. Earlier I had mentioned I wanted to lose 20 pounds. That is my goal. As a goal I want to lose 20 pounds. Perhaps my objective would be something like, in order to lose 20 pounds I'm going to limit how much sugar I eat, I'm going to exercise 30 minutes per day am going to conduct weekly weigh ins. As you can see those are tactics I'm going to use in order to achieve my goal. When you write objectives you should use action verbs. Your objectives should be clear. They should articulate things that another person can see or hear or touch or feel. You want use action verbs and you want your statements to be items that very clearly articulate the steps and tactics you're going to use to achieve your goal. As I mentioned in your materials there are handouts that we have created for I-LED which takes you through in more detail how to write objectives. It is something you might want to refer to when you write agendas, but also if you write any kind of education programs or if you are doing and he kind of seminar or presentation. They can be helpful. Let's get a little bit engaged and think about writing an objective. If you were to be having a meeting and you were going to be outlining your deliverable for eight two your grant -- for a two-year grant and you wanted to write an objective specifically around timeline, what is the timeline for this grant and what you're going to be producing? Would someone care to help me out and write an objective for your meeting? I will start you off with a sentence. At this meeting we will: -- think about an objective that corresponds to a timeline, to creating a timeline. With regards to losing weight? No. With regards to your meeting you're having about your deliverables for your grant. Talking about the timeline on your grant. What would be an objective? An objective for the topic of timeline? This is for the meeting with the OVW program specialist. Michelle is writing, at this meeting we will create a list of tasks and duties. That is a very clear objective. Miserable. We can see you've created a list, we will be able to see it. Can be done in time certain. Specific. I know what you're saying. Angela is writing, at this meeting we will learn the timeline it needed to complete the goals. Great. Amanda is typing. Generally speaking if you were using this gender -- agenda development process you would look at the topics you listed and you will write objectives for your meeting based on those topics. Depending on how specific you have gotten with your list of topics, if your topics are bigger topics you might want to have one objective for each of those topics, if you were very specific about the topics you wanted to address in your meeting, it may be that those topics are small enough that more than one of them could be accomplished through a single objective. In any event you want to consider those topics when you're writing your objective for your agenda. At that point do you have done this sort of process thinking about your needs for your topics and written these objectives, your links of this meeting you're going to have will take shape. If you went into this process know you had to have a meeting with your OVW program manager or your supervisor or funder, you knew to -- you had to have this meeting, you had to deal with a lot of different issues and you made a list of topics you had to cover, you wrote objectives based on those topics. The amount of time you're going to need for the meeting will start to take shape. You should be able to see, I have this many objectives, we are covering 10 needs, we are probably going to need one hour to accomplish this objective. We will probably need 1.5 hours for the next objective. As you go through this process of thinking through the needs and writing objectives based on the needs the duration of the meeting will be readily apparent. This is also on this form, where you might want to start thinking about things like meeting tasks. What you think I mean by a premeeting task. Right into the chat what I might mean by that. -- You can write into the chat what I mean by that. Selecting information that will be important for all attendees to have. Great. Definitely. In annotated agenda Michelle is writing. Great. Annotated agendas are helpful at all of our in person workshops we utilize annotated agendas to make sure all the folks leading have a detailed plan of what we are covering. Denise is saying research items to be discussed. Get a room, refreshments and invites. Those are all great answers. Preparation meeting to be done for the meeting. What is to be discussed at the meeting. Materials that should be previewed prior to the meeting, great. And also reading that should be completed before hand. These are great suggestions. Some of the items I was thinking about, some of them you have named, gathering any kind of material you might want your participants to have read in advance. Let's say you're having a meeting with your program manager and your partners for instance on your grant, you might want to share copies of your special conditions that are on your grant or the terms of your grant. For everyone at that meeting. You will want to invite people to the meeting, you want to locate space. If you're going to have it in person. If you're having it on the phone you're going to want to arrange telephone numbers or a webinar platform. You will need to determine whether or not you have to submit a conference approval form for OVW if it's going to be a Live Meeting. You will want to think about any kind of accessibility needs also that you might have for the meeting. There is a spot on the worksite for accessibility considerations. As an example, if you're having a meeting in person, you want to make sure you have located a venue or hotel accessible to people who may have a disability. You may have to create materials in large font or braille. You may need an interpreter. These are all accessibility considerations and premeeting tasks you might want to think about. Continuing on in the tool, we now have a goal. We have objectives. We have topics. We have an idea of about how long we may need for this meeting. We have an idea of what we need to do in advance. If you look at page 3 of the agenda development worksheet here on the screen, I have a screenshot of it, you'll see that the tool is even further broken down by topic so that you can really think about the segments of your meeting and any kind of notes you might want to take and prepare for the individual segments or pieces of your meeting. If we were having an all-day meeting and you're having four objectives you wanted to accomplish in that all-day meeting, you might break down the day according to those objectives. You may have two hours of the day he committed to that first objective or that first topic that you need. You can use this worksheet to think through who is the responsible party for leading the discussion? But also for leading the discussion but also for accomplishing whatever needs to be done during that time at the meeting. If you're holding the meeting by a web call for instance, maybe one person is facilitating the call but maybe you have another person who is helping to deal with the technology of that call. You want to maybe list those things here as a responsible party. You can take a look at tasks and think about, how are you going to accomplish the objective of this particular topic? What kind of activities will you use? Are you simply going to have -- sit around the table and have a small group discussion? Maybe you will gather around with the terms of your grant and your calendar award and have a discussion. But if you are doing it on a web call, perhaps you want to accomplish this objective a different way. Maybe it's a little harder to have interactive conversations in a free-flowing way on a web call. Maybe you want to designate how you are going to discuss the material in a more intentional way. Maybe you're going to call on people and go round Robin and have a list of people and ask for people to weigh-in one after the other. This is a space for you to think about how we are going to accomplish the objective. And to think through, what is the follow-up that is needed? And to think through any challenges that may arise during this portion of the meeting. What we mean by that? What kind of challenges? It could be anything really. You may have technology challenges that could come up if you are doing a meeting remotely. Or even if you are using technology at the meeting in person. You might want to think through some solution to that. Maybe a backup plan. Make sure we have materials on paper as well. That kind of thing. Other challenges that may arise, maybe they are relationship type challenges. Maybe it's an example of a meeting with the OVW specialist, perhaps you have a partner in this grant and there has been a little history where accomplishing the objectives of the grant have been difficult and maybe that is something that may come up in the meeting. Maybe you want to think through that and think about what are some ways you might deal with that in advance? What are some solutions you can take in order to deal with any kind of challenges that might arise when you're at the meeting? Those are the main pieces of this tool. Those are the main elements of the process we use for designing an agenda. Why use a tool like this? Why even bother to use a tool like this? If anybody wants to put something in the chat -- just is saying spending time on the front end of a project will save time in the long run. Absolutely. I agree with that. Make your meetings as engaging and worthwhile as possible. Absolutely. To be as efficient as possible and utilize limited time we have. Definitely. How often do we go to meetings as I said at the beginning of this webinar and we go and people think, I just spent two hours of my life I will never get back. We want our meetings to be productive. Nicole said, to have actions come out of your meeting. Absolutely. That is why I like to use the tool to make note of follow-up and who is going to do it. That is really important because I know for myself I am often working on a lot of different things. I may think during a meeting I'm going to remember in two months that it was me who was supposed to follow-up on a specific item or that it was my colleague who supposed to follow-up. But really, it's hard to remember those things. Michelle wrote, that you will actually prepare for all the things that might come up, make sure you don't forget all the things that feel obvious while you're thinking about it forget when you get in front of people. That is a great answer Michelle. Absolutely. I think for me in using the tool, that piece around challenges that might come up are, that piece is really important, there's really nothing worse than being at a meeting and having stuff go wrong especially if you are facilitating the meeting and her nervous already. Just been caught out there without really having thought in advance about how you might deal with some of the things that come up. I also think the other piece of this is the idea of writing an agenda, feels like it should be natural, where you don't really need process for it. But coming up with the meeting or hosting a meeting, facilitating a meeting, there is a lot involved. Part of the benefit of using a process, it doesn't have to be this process, but something similar, is it not only are you thinking through substantively what are we going to cover in this meeting, so that we are using our time efficiently, you're also thinking of all the other extra things that you have to do to make sure the meeting is a success, to make sure what you agree to actually happened. Make sure you can look back and see what was decided, why it was decided, I find for me, when I use this tool I can attach it later on after a meeting to the actual official agenda that I would distribute, you're not going to distribute your tool, you would distribute a formal agenda. I will a Goldmine -- I will combine this as well. If I go back and say this is what I was hoping to do year -- here and this is why, you can see more of your thought process. KERA wrote respectful, professional to have a process and set an agenda. I think that is true. I think it's important to be respectful of each other's time. Our time is so important and there is so much of what we do that is difficult, that can be emotional, the time we spent together and we are trying to think and make important decisions, we really should take the time to make that process as smooth as possible. And really the essence of doing that is in planning. I do believe that. We have about 15 minutes for questions. Folks can use the chat to ask any questions about this process or about meeting design or about I-LED or anything you would like to ask. Any questions? I think another benefit to using a process like this is that it will help you create more accurate agendas for your conference approval forms. When you actually get to the work of creating your conference or meeting, you don't look back at your conference approval form agenda and find it doesn't reflect anything of your needs at all or that it is substantively at odds with what you're actually planning to do in a way that might raise red flags for you with your funder or are funder. I think it is helpful, especially for that process. Nicole was typing, I'm going to see if there any questions. Okay. I see some people. Thank you all for being here today. Please feel free to contact me at any time. I see a question. A couple of issues running into during meetings is individuals do not do the prep work and meetings can get off topic and lose focus. Is this a good design to help? >> I think so. I think one of the things, especially, someone mentioned at the beginning of the process, or the webinar, the idea of being collaborative. Around designing agendas, I think what you could do, especially if it's something where a couple of people are responsible for a meeting, you could use this type of form in advance of doing the agenda. And think through together collaboratively what are some of the needs, what are some of the topics we want to cover, who is going to be responsible and fill it out as a team in a collaborative way so that by the time you get to the agenda writing, you are already on board. Folks are already down to move forward in a way that is a shared vision. I think this would be a helpful tool for that kind of process. Thank you. Thanks Nicole. How far in advance do I do prep material, long enough that they don't get set aside and lost, but long enough that people have time and don't have to disregard other tasks or cram. I think it really depends on how much work you are requiring of people. I think if you are giving people items to read through, especially if they are dense items, I would give people at least two weeks to go through that. I would say minimum two weeks. If it is just an agenda and you want people to weigh in, if it is a short agenda, short meeting, it would probably be okay to send it one week in advance. But I think one week is a good amount of time for a short agenda where you don't -- where you don't need people to weigh in a lot or do a lot of prep work. If folks need to do prep work you need to give them two weeks or more. It's not a hard and fast rule certainly but I would error on the side of giving at least two weeks. For most of us who are operating on grants, most of the time we need to have 30 days approval anyway. It is probably best to give yourself a fair chunk of time. To get things out and to give people a chance. Any other questions? Those are great questions. Okay. Feel free to contact me at my email address which is up here. Jwhite@futureswithoutviolence.org. That is the best way to get in touch with me. We do a lot of work, as I said, around faculty development, facilitation, also curriculum design. That is my favorite of the courses, the curriculum design work which we have coming up in a sober. It is in the process of being approved by OVW and will most likely be in Portland Oregon. Keep an eye out for registration materials for that. I would love to see some of you at our curriculum development workshop if you're interested and hopefully I will meet with you again virtually in another one of these meetings. Thank you so much. >> Audio recording for this meeting has now ended. Meeting is now over. All the participants have been disconnected. >>