4.4. USING THE 7PS TO PLAN A MEETING

PLANNING A MEETING WITH THE 7PS

Background:

A volunteer group that works helping immigrant children from South America every Saturday with their homework and studies. They do it in a school and children spent 5 hours there. Each trimester they organize an excursion with all of them.

The leadership team are a teacher from the school and students from Bachillerato and University degrees (normally old-students of the school). They plan for the schedule, activities, materials, the budget needed and the ages they are going to teach.

They normally do it a weekend before the beginning of each trimester spending a night out in a hostel in the mountain. They get to know each other, they do workshops and they organise meetings each day.

Activity: The 7Ps to plan the meeting of the first trimester.

Purpose:

The purpose of this meeting is to organise the trimester in the volunteer group. They should decide:

• If the schedule is going to be the same as other years
• At what time they have a break
• What type of food children are given in the break time (as most of them don’t have breakfast at home)
• Who is going to lead each of the age groups
• If they need extra materials (apart from the text books children bring)
• How to deal with parents
• When to do the excursion
• Other proposals or suggestions

People:

They are 22 teachers and 35 children. The team:

• A group leader and a secretary
• 10 students from Bachillerato
• 10 University students

Parents are also very important as they normally also want a meeting.

In the meeting I would only need the group leader, the secretary and some representatives from each of the groups (one from 1ºBach, another from 2º Bach) and the two University leaders.

Product:

We intend to get a product in form of a final paper that each of the monitors will receive with information about schedules, the role of each of them, resources and materials they can use.

Process:

We would start brainstorming the main issues and problems from the previous term.

Then, we would organise speaking times.

Each of the members would give ideas and we would discuss them in order to reach agreements.

• Money
• Children: context, characteristics, ages, needs
• People needed for each age group
• Schedules (class and excursions)
• Role of each member
• Resources and materials needed: food, school material, classes, resources…
• How to inform parents / schools
• Classroom rules

-   A document will be written as a summary to inform the resto of the group.

For that we need:

Preparation: list of children, permission from parents to use the data, schedules available, classes we can use, knowing the opinion of the rest of the group about some issues, asking parents about their preferences, knowing the availability of the school where the volunteer group works…

Practical concerns: it has to be on Saturday morning, some of the volunteer students have exams so they will not come when exams are near (we need to reorganise, substitute volunteers…), the school has its rules that we have to follow as well, some children don’t have breakfast at home…

Pitfalls:

-  We might have problems with the older students: they leave their homes but they don’t come on time, it’s our responsibility to be sure that they arrive.

-   Some of them often lie to us so it’s important to have a list with their subjects, exams… to build a respectful and confident environment.

-   Money comes from charity so we need to save it with responsibility.

FINAL REFLECTION:

    This is a real example as I used to work for this volunteer group, first just as a teacher but then also as the secretary and finally the group leader. We planned meetings but they were normally a disaster as, in my opinion, too many people participated in them. We should have used strategies as the 7ps and they would have been much more effective. I think it is really important to have all this in mind and reconsider how we normally plan meetings.