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All Bonner Large Group Meetings

Page history last edited by Mike Austerlitz 15 years, 8 months ago


Background & Purpose | Benchmarks | Examples of Excellence and Innovation | Campus Examples & Resources


 

Background and Purpose:

All Bonner Meetings are important to building the identity and community among Bonner students on a campus. Held regularly, though not necessarily frequently, these meetings can be a great forum to build, celebrate, recognize, and deepen the Bonner campus community. They are often best when they combine a mix of business (e.g., calendar review and looking forward to upcoming dates), training and enrichment (e.g., community building workshops or inspiring community speakers), celebration (e.g., awards or Senior Presentations), and reflection (e.g., often using class or other small groups).
 

Benchmarks: 

CRITICAL CONTENT GUIDELINES for All Bonner or Large Group Meetings:
  • Plan meetings to combine business, training and enrichment, community building and celebration, and reflection. For example:
    • During one meeting, you can have a blend of these various activities, perhaps using an interactive format that contains a community building activity, a brief training piece, announcements, and a small group reflection activity. To do so, a meeting may need to be more than one hour in length (maybe 1.5-2 hours).
    • Over time, weave in these various types of content in different proportions. For example, perhaps one meeting can be devoted to identifying what students have learned about the communities and agencies where they will be serving. This topic could be complemented by training on community asset mapping that you are providing during class meetings. The All Bonner Meeting could focus on providing students with a brief, exemplar orientations by community agency representatives, complemented by an introduction to a skit structure that students can put together after completing their community asset map and scavenger hunt. A third meeting could serve as a forum for small groups to share their community skits, both as a way to showcase the learning and build the sense of community.
    • Build the outline of the All Bonner Meetings over a semester or year, weaving them in with the Class/Small Group Meetings and 1-to-1 Meetings as well. Consider how the topics and variety of meeting types build on one another, as well as how they coincide with students’ service and experience.
CRITICAL PROCESS GUIDELINES for All Bonner Meetings:
  • Have either an agenda or a structure that allows the group to generate the agenda and clarify topics to be covered.
  • Involve students, tapping into your program’s student leadership structures (such as Congress Representatives, Senior Intern(s), Student Leadership Committees, Class Representatives, etc.) in planning, leading and facilitating during All Bonner Meetings.
  • Over time, have a delegation plan for meeting planning that spreads the responsibilities among various individuals and/or groups (of staff, students, faculty, guests). However, also have clearly defined expectations about what is a high-quality agenda and how to incorporate feedback from one meeting to the next.
FREQUENCY AND LENGTH of All Bonner Meetings:
  • All Bonner Meetings are roughly an hour to two hours in length (60-120 minutes; the length is tied to the frequency; e.g., if meetings are held only once per semester, they may need to be longer than two hours).
  • The Bonner Foundation does not specify the frequency of All Bonner Meetings. The frequency of these meetings is connected with the presence of other Bonner Meetings, such as Class Meetings and 1-to-1 Meetings; for instance, a campus that holds class meetings at least every other week and 1-to-1 Meetings each semester may only hold All Bonner Meetings once per semester.
 

Examples of Excellence and Innovation:

Keep Business at a Minimum by Using Regular Email Reminders
  • One challenge with All Bonner Meetings is that they become tired and tiring because of agendas consisting only of announcements and business. Some campuses counter this by having a policy that keeps the business portion of agendas to a minimum. Rhodes College, for example, sends an email with regular announcements, reminders, and dates every other week.
Use Creative Ways to Reinforce Attendance (if meetings are not mandatory)
  • While some campuses require students to attend All Bonner Meetings, others do not. Those that do not mandate attendance (and even some of those that do) have cited difficulties with student attendance. Carson-Newman College opted to eliminate mandatory requirements in favor of a Bonner Involvement Point system that requires students to obtain a given number of points per semester, but allows flexibility for students to choose which activities to attend. All Bonner Meetings have a certain point value (which also reinforces attendance due to its high value). Other campuses try to weave in a great deal of fun, social activities, and celebration into these meetings, and they find that students actually look forward to them.
 

Campus Examples and Resources:

All Bonner Meeting Agendas:
 
 

 

 

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