Too often adults (even educators), when they work together, forget what they know about how people learn and fall back on old habits. They revert to the model of one or two people who are in charge of the meeting presenting material orally or visually and answering questions. Administrative meetings often follow this pattern. While a lot of information can be presented in this way,  the level of understanding and retention can be very low and gradually gets lower. The audience’s attention drifts to other things such as what they would rather be doing than sitting passively in this meeting.

This is an ideal opportunity to change things up with CL techniques such as Everyone Can Explain, Cooperative Debate, or Jigsaw. Given an on-topic conversation starter, the participants form diverse groups and process the information together, sharing the cognitive load of especially challenging material or sharing the enjoyment of planning how to implement new ideas into their work and maybe personal lives. They can then share their insights with the larger group. The meeting leader becomes the facilitator and incorporates the creativity of the team into further work that day or in future work together