Expectations for Team Participation

(upbeat music) - When schools begin to contemplate becoming more inclusive. One of the important structures and processes that they need to put into place is the establishment of what's called a leadership team or an inclusion task force or an inclusion implementation team. And obviously recruiting and selecting members for that team is very important because you need to make sure that kind of all stake holder voices are represented. And it's important for those team members to understand what their participation on this team entails in terms of their commitment. And I think it's probably best to just put right out there the expectation for participation on this team. And that expectation is recorded on the flip chart paper so to speak, everyone is asked to vocalize their agreement with sticking to those expectations. And also, the group should determine what to do if someone is not fulfilling the expectations of participation in membership on this team. I think having a public declaration of I will be there at every meeting unless my childcare falls through or unless, I run out of gas, I think asking people to publicly declare that is important. And I also think that there ought to be some process for getting in touch with someone who is showing a pattern of non-participation at finding out what's going on reminding them of their commitment and then, perhaps deciding that that person needs to be replaced on the team. The worst thing I think that can happen is that, someone says they wanna be part of the team, they don't attend team meetings for several weeks but then all of a sudden they pop back in and either they wanna go over territory that's already been covered or they raise new objections that just puts the breaks on kind of the momentum and the progress of the team. And it also makes for bad feeling. So I think clear expectations upfront and a process of sort of repair of the team's workings, if it's not working well