Meetings

Run sheet

One row per slide, to glance at while the deck is on screen. The reasoning behind every answer is in the sections below. Deck: /deck/meetings/main.pdf.

Timing

A full session. No meeting takes place in this hour: the groups hold their own meeting in their timetabled group-work slot, and bring the completed Week 5 minutes to the next class session.

If you are running late, cut a bad meeting rather than slide 20. A group that leaves without a rota and an agreed time is the group whose next meeting does not happen. The Python slides are the other thing not to cut: a group that cannot write a working loop in Week 4 does not catch up by Week 8 on its own.

Slides 16 to 19 are the orientation section: what the project actually is, what a week looks like, the shape of the term, and what to do when a group does not know what to do. They were added because several students asked plainly what they were supposed to be doing. Go through them even when the room looks confident, since the groups that need them are the ones least likely to ask.

In class meeting

The deck. There is a write-on deck at /deck/meetings/main.pdf. Each of the four bad meetings on slides 4 to 7 has a workspace under its question, the three role cards on slide 8 are empty, and the rota, the meeting slot and the next chair on slide 20 are blanks each group fills in for itself. The four Python slides, 12 to 15, each have a workspace for the answer the room gives. Answers are at the end of these notes.

The spine of this class is four meetings that went wrong. Each one is a slide with a diagram and a question; put the question to the room and let them answer before you give the reading.

Do not run a demonstration meeting, and no group meeting happens in this hour. The bad examples do the work, and the groups hold their own meeting in their timetabled slot afterwards.

Open with the meeting and workshop distinction. This is the single idea that the rest of the class depends on: a meeting has an agenda and produces decisions, a workshop has laptops and produces work. Most student group sessions are a poor hybrid of the two.

Say what a workshop is, but do not tell them to hold one. The project work is theirs to arrange, some of it alone and some of it together, and how they divide it is not our business. What matters is that none of it is the meeting. A group that works well on its own and meets for twenty structured minutes a week is doing exactly the right thing.

Then the three purposes: inform, discuss, decide. The test to give them is that if you cannot say which of the three an agenda item is, the item is not ready.

Work through the four bad meetings:

1. No agenda. The timeline drifts from "where are we?" to a tangent about LaTeX fonts and ends with nothing decided. Ask what the secretary could possibly write. The answer, that there is nothing to write, is the point.
2. A workshop in disguise. Real work gets done, a genuine bug is fixed, and the meeting fails anyway: three agenda items are never reached and the quiet member contributed nothing and is recorded as having done nothing. Ask what it costs D specifically. This connects back to \(I\).
3. One person ran it. A talks for 35 of 40 minutes, everyone agrees, the minutes look immaculate. Ask what is missing. Steer towards the observation that unanimous agreement with no discussion is evidence of a problem, not of a healthy group.
4. No record. Nothing goes wrong in the room at all. A week later nobody can remember who agreed to what. Ask what it costs the group, then what it costs each member.

Draw the four together: the common failures are no agenda, no separation of meeting from workshop, no chair making space, and no secretary. The three roles fix all four, and they rotate weekly.

Finish the taught part with the standing agenda, then slide 10, which is the one that matters: the minutes are where \(I\) comes from, the group meets in its own slot this week, and the completed form comes to the next session.

This week's Python

Slides 11 to 15 cover the week's two chapters, variables with conditionals and loops, and functions with data structures. They are not a lecture on either: the students read the chapters themselves, and these slides put the four things that actually catch people in front of the room. Each one is a question with a workspace under it, so let the room answer before you do.

Slide 12, one equals sign or two? The code assigns inside a condition, which is a syntax error in Python rather than a silent bug. One sign assigns a value, two signs ask a question. Worth saying that other languages let this through silently and Python does not, because the error message is the thing they will actually meet.

Slide 13, the loop that never stops. Nothing in the body changes number, so the condition stays true forever. The missing line is number = number + 1. The general rule is worth more than the fix: read the loop out loud and ask what changes the condition. If nothing does, it never stops.

Slide 14, when is something a function? The prompt is that they have written the same three lines twice. The answer is that it wants a name, and that giving it one is what a function is for. Point at the docstring while you are there: it is part of the Documentation mark in Week 9, not decoration.

Slide 15, list, tuple, set or dictionary? Four examples, four cards, and the room fills them in. The roots of a polynomial are a list, a point in the plane is a tuple, the vertices of a graph are a set, and a lookup from name to mark is a dictionary. The reasoning matters more than the answers: does order matter, can there be repeats, does it change after you build it. Push every answer back to the mathematics rather than to Python.

Closing

Then slide 20, and give the groups the last eight minutes on it in the room. They need three things settled before they leave: the secretary rota for the five meeting weeks, when and where they will meet, and who chairs the next one. Walk the room while they do it. A group that cannot name a time and a chair will not meet this week, and that is the failure you can still prevent from here.

Two things to flag while you are at it, since they shape the first form. A group that writes only a list of names has recorded attendance, not engagement, and the form asks for what each member contributed. A group of three present and one absent should still record the absent member and say so; a member who is genuinely unwell and catches up through the minutes can still be recorded as engaged in a later week.

Communications

Before class

Send the following message before class:

Hi all,

In tomorrow's class we will look at four group meetings that went
wrong, and work out what went wrong in each one.

This is directly useful to you: your group meets every week from now
on, and the minutes of those meetings are the evidence for the
individual part of your project mark.

Nothing to prepare. If you have been in a group that ran badly
before, bring the memory, it will be relevant.

Please get in touch if I can assist with anything,
Vince

After class

Send the following message after class:

Hi all,

The slides from today's class on meetings are on the website,
together with an example agenda and the printable minutes template
for each week:

https://vknight.org/cfm/topics/meetings.html

The last few slides answer the question several of you have asked:
what the project actually is, what a week looks like, and what to
do if your group is not sure what it is meant to be doing.

Before this week's meeting: confirm your secretary rota, confirm
when and where you meet, and have the chair circulate an agenda in
advance. Print the Week 5 minutes template and bring it with you.

If you do not know what you are supposed to be doing, say so. It is
a reasonable thing to say and an easy one to answer.

Please get in touch if I can assist with anything,
Vince

Answers for the deck

Slide 2, which one have your group sessions been so far? Almost always the honest answer is neither cleanly: an unstructured hybrid. That is the point of asking, and it lands better coming from them than from you.

Slide 4, what does the secretary write? There is nothing to write. No decision was taken, no action was assigned, and no information was shared that anybody could act on. Push until someone says this out loud, because it is the whole argument for an agenda: the agenda is what makes it possible to tell whether the meeting succeeded.

Slide 5, what did it cost D? The group got a good bug fix, so the cost is invisible at group level. D contributed nothing, so the minutes record nothing against D's name, so D's \(I\) takes the hit for a session in which the group did real work. Expect someone to object that this is unfair. It is the right objection: the fix is not to mark D differently, it is for the chair to have stopped the meeting becoming a workshop.

Slide 6, what is missing? Disagreement. Three decisions were taken and nobody questioned any of them, which means either the decisions were not really examined or the other three did not feel able to speak. Unanimity with no discussion is evidence of a problem, not of health. The chair prevents it with round-robin discussion and by checking each decision member by member, which is next week's material.

Slide 7, what did it cost? Two things, and students usually only get the first. The group loses the decisions and has to retake them. Each member individually loses the evidence of their engagement, because the minutes are what \(I\) is computed from. A meeting that is not recorded did not happen as far as the mark is concerned.

Slide 8, what do the three roles do, and how often do they change?

• Chair: writes and circulates the agenda beforehand, keeps to time, brings every member in, and calls the decision when the group is split.
• Secretary: writes the minutes during the meeting: who attended, what was discussed, what was decided, what actions were assigned.
• Members: everyone else, and the role is active. Contribute, raise questions, accept actions.

They rotate every week, so every member does each role over the five meeting weeks. Groups reliably guess chair and secretary and then say members "just attend"; that is the one to correct.

Slide 20, the four items. The first three are filled in by each group for itself, not by you, and they are the ten minutes of group work in this session. A group that cannot name next week's chair before leaving is the group to check on first. The fourth is the one to say out loud rather than leave them to read: they meet in their own slot this week, and the completed Week 5 minutes come to the next class session.