A few questions to warm up and check the basics. They are reshuffled each time, so you can keep retrying.
In the second half of this module your group meets every week. The quality of those meetings is the foundation for everything else you produce together. These notes describe what a meeting is, what it is not, and how to run one.
The material is adapted from the Principles of Meetings repository, which itself summarises the literature on effective meetings [1, 2].
The two activities that take place during group work in this course are meetings and workshops. They serve different purposes and are run differently.
A meeting is a structured gathering with a fixed agenda. The group comes together to inform, discuss, or decide. People take turns to speak, decisions are recorded, and the meeting ends when the agenda is exhausted. A meeting is short. It does not need a laptop.
A workshop is a group working session. The group sits together to write code, debug a function, draft a paragraph, or work through an exercise. Laptops are open. Discussion is informal and free-flowing. There is no fixed agenda; instead, there is a piece of work to make progress on.
We emphasise the distinction because the two are often conflated, and the result is a poor version of both. A workshop dressed up as a meeting wastes time. A meeting that drifts into a workshop never reaches its decisions.
In practice your group will hold a short meeting at the start of each collaboration session, then move into a workshop for the rest of the time. The meeting is what produces the minutes you submit.
Every meeting has one of three purposes:
A meeting can have all three purposes in turn, but each agenda item should have exactly one. If you find yourself unable to say whether an item is to inform, discuss, or decide, the item is not yet ready for the meeting.
Decide whether the meeting needs to happen. Rescheduling a meeting that has no clear purpose is better than holding a meeting that has no clear purpose.
Write the agenda. Be precise. For information items, include the information in the agenda itself. For discussion items, write the specific questions to be discussed. For decision items, write the decision as a question. Share the agenda with all members in advance.
Start on time. Identify a chair and a secretary for the meeting (see roles below). Work through the agenda, item by item. The chair keeps the meeting on time; the secretary records the discussion and decisions.
For each agenda item, finish with a clear outcome: the information has been shared, the discussion is closed, or the decision has been made. Note any action items that arise, with the name of the person responsible and the deadline.
The secretary completes the minutes and shares them with the group. The group hands in the printed minutes during the contact hour. Action items are tracked at the next meeting.
Group meetings in this module use three roles.
Chair. The chair sets the agenda before the meeting and runs the meeting itself. During the meeting the chair keeps to time, moves the group from item to item, and ensures that everyone has a chance to contribute. For discussion items the chair provides what one of our reference texts calls "psychological safety to encourage everyone to participate" [1]. For decision items the chair gathers the relevant information; the decision itself need not be democratic, but it should be informed.
Secretary. The secretary records the meeting. This means writing down who attended, what was discussed, what was decided, and what action items were assigned. The secretary's notes are the minutes of the meeting, which the group submits each week.
Members. Every other member of the group is an active participant. They contribute to discussions, raise questions, propose decisions, and accept action items. Being a member is not a passive role.
We ask groups to rotate the chair and the secretary each week so that every member experiences both roles over the course of the project.
Each week of the group project phase, your group holds a meeting at the start of its working session. The meeting agenda has three standing items:
The secretary records the meeting in the week's minutes template (see below) and the group submits a printed copy during the contact hour. The remainder of the working session is a workshop: open laptops, write code, make progress.
The chair circulates an agenda before the meeting. As an example of what an agenda looks like in practice, we provide one for your group's first meeting in Week 6:
Example agenda: first meeting (PDF)
Use it as a model when you write your own agendas for subsequent weeks. A good agenda is specific: each item names the purpose (inform, discuss, or decide) and an estimated duration.
The minutes are the written record of the meeting. They serve two purposes: they let absent members catch up, and they are the evidence used for the individual component of the group project mark. Every week's minutes should contain:
We provide a printable template for each week. The templates differ slightly to match the content of the week:
Print and bring the form to the meeting, or copy the structure onto a sheet of your own. The group submits the printed minutes together at the contact hour.