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How to Run a Democratic Meeting
by Jerry Mintz
Director, Alternative Education Resource
Organization
Every school that calls itself democratic has a
unique kind of meeting. Each must evolve its own
process. Most of my experience was with Shaker
Mountain School, which I founded in 1967 and
directed for 17 years. We are now applying and
evolving some of those processes at Brooklyn
Free School, which we helped to organize and has
been running since 2004.
One of the keys to an effective democratic
process is to define what decisions the meeting
is going to have the power to make. It’s very
important not to imply that the meeting can
decide anything and then have that not be the
case. That can destroy the whole process.
At Shaker Mountain we never had a limit on who
could speak or for how long. Everybody who had
an opinion was able to express it. It was up to
the chairperson, however, to point it out if he
or she felt someone had been talking too much,
or simply to call on more people to get a more
balanced discussion going.
An important stage of maturity that students
would get to was when they were able to
criticize their friends in a meeting, if they
felt they had done something wrong. When the
meeting was functioning well, people had no
qualms about doing that and they knew they would
still be friends with that person after the
meeting. This is something that is not easy to
achieve in a new democracy. When that happens
you know that your democracy is working well.
Serious problems were sometimes brought up in
the meetings. If anyone thought an issue would
be difficult for the parties involved to talk
about it in a meeting, they could propose that
we establish a “small group” of volunteers who
would work with the person or persons involved
in that issue. The individuals had the right to
reject anyone who volunteered, so the group
would consist of people who were acceptable to
the parties involved. If necessary, the small
group would come up with proposals to make to
the meeting. This could be for any issue, but
was usually employed when an individual student
didn’t feel like they could talk to the whole
meeting about something.
At Shaker Mountain, we were not allowed to have
an agenda item about someone who was not
actually there or at least informed. However, if
students were informed that the meeting was
going to be about them, and they did not come,
the meeting could make whatever decision it
wanted.
At Shaker Mountain a meeting could not be held
unless somebody was willing to record the
meeting in our logbook, a blank, bound volume.
Reading these logbooks now is very interesting
because whoever was taking the log would write
his or her own editorial comments and draw funny
pictures. The scribe was allowed to do that as
long as they got the basic information down
about what was being discussed and what was
proposed, what passed and didn’t pass.
It is crucial to have a meeting record so that
people can look back and see what decisions have
been made. People would often look at the
logbook to see, for example, whether somebody
had a “warning” or a “strong warning.” At Shaker
Mountain warnings were debated very seriously.
If you got a warning it would mean that if you
did it again you could still get a strong
warning, but if you got a strong warning and you
violated that subsequently, the meeting would
have no choice but to take some kind of action
and find a consequence to that violation of the
school rules. There’d be a lot of discussion
about whether somebody should get a warning or a
strong warning and people would often look up
previous decisions.
In a democratic meeting the chairperson has a
crucial role. He or she really needs to know how
to listen, and needs the reflexes of an athlete
to do it right because there should be a minimum
of time between when one person finishes
speaking and the next person is called on. The
chairperson should also be aware of the order in
which people have requested to speak. There are
various ways of doing this; some people make a
speaker’s list. But I think it’s better if the
chairperson has more leeway; for example, they
should be able to call on somebody who hasn’t
had anything to say yet rather than the same few
people who have been speaking. They need to be
aware of how to keep the flow going and how to
stay on topic, and should stop people
immediately if they go off topic. At our school,
where we had as many as 25 things on the agenda
at a time, it was imperative to stay on topic.
The chairperson needs to be able to stop
somebody immediately and say, “Okay, this is not
the subject we’re talking about, but if you want
we can add it to the agenda.” If the discussion
is becoming repetitive they can say “These are
the last hands I am taking before we vote.”
Because we had so many meetings and in so many
different circumstances—on trips, at the
boarding part of the school, and so on—people
felt it was necessary for everyone to know how
to chair a meeting. A new student would almost
immediately be put to the test and get feedback
and help on how to be a good chairperson. The
majority of the students in the school learned
how to run a meeting well. Usually the students
ran the meetings, and they could often run them
better than the staff. Our younger students were
some of the best chairpersons. They were usually
the fairest and the quickest, and knew if
something was going off topic.
Some schools run their meetings with the agenda
decided in advance; others make it up right
there. I believe you should have a combination.
If people have something that they want on the
agenda, that should be put on in advance and
people should know about it. On the other hand
people should not have to wait too long for
something that they want to discuss. In fact, at
Shaker Mountain “emergency meetings” were called
by simply ringing the meeting bell. No
permission was needed.
Most of the schools that have been established
on the Sudbury Valley model use a set system,
the well-established Robert’s Rules of Order. We
did not really follow Robert’s Rules of Order.
We evolved our own system. This was largely
influenced by our interaction and early
communication with the Lewis Wadhams School,
which was based on Summerhill School, and with
the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawk Tribe in
particular.
I worked as an intern at Lewis Wadhams school in
the early ‘60’s. In Summerhill type meetings,
they are allowed to have proposals against other
proposals. Very often they’ll have two or three
proposals against each other. And sometimes
they’d do “all against all” which means that if
the majority of people are against all the
proposals, then nothing passes. We used to do
the same thing at Shaker Mountain. If two
proposals could legitimately be against each
other, we could have them both on there. Or if
they were not necessarily related to each other
directly, so that they could stand alone, we
could have several different proposals at a time
and vote on them all at once, one at a time,
rather than wait, as Robert’s Rules says, for
the next item to come up.
Personally, I think it’s important that meetings
be well structured and that they follow the
structure consistently. Whatever structure is
decided on, whatever has evolved, people need to
be well versed in it. The meeting must be taken
seriously. It should be quiet during the meeting
so everybody can hear. One thing I found really
useful when I had meetings with a very large
group of students is a portable microphone so
that even those with soft voices could be heard.
I know of a fairly large charter school that is
doing democratic process and is using the
portable microphone idea.
The way Summerhill controls noise is that the
chairperson has the power to warn people and to
fine them or have them leave the meeting if
they’re being disruptive. At Shaker Mountain we
never fined anyone because nobody had any money
in our school, but people did get warnings and
were asked to leave the meeting for a certain
period of time if they had been disruptive. Then
they could come back later if they chose.
At Shaker Mountain meetings were not mandatory.
However, if the meetings felt that everyone in
the school needed to be in on a decision, or to
be aware of a particular situation, somebody
could propose that the meeting become a “super
meeting.” If the proposal passed, everybody who
was in the school building needed to come to the
meeting until it was voted that it was no longer
a super meeting. Usually super meetings would
not last too long and would be about some urgent
issue.
In the early years at Shaker Mountain, we
visited the Mohawk tribe of the Iroquois
Confederacy. We learned how the Iroquois made
decisions and we discovered an alternative to
the usual “tyranny of the majority.” We learned
how they honor the minority. After each vote if
someone in the minority wished to say something
more, they could express why it was that they
voted in opposition. Then they or anybody else
could call for a revote. A revote would mean
“with discussion” so it reopened the subject and
it was possible to make a new proposal and drop
the original one or put a new proposal up
against it. We found that this process was more
thorough and that when we made a decision we
were usually confident that we would not have to
come back and revisit the subject.
With our Iroquois democracy system, the minority
gets a chance to say what is bothering them, or
they can bring up another facet of the situation
that hasn’t been thought of. In this way we
found that we often made decisions that nobody
would have thought of in the first place. This
is the great power of the meeting and it’s this
interactive process that is “more than the sum
of its parts.”
The Iroquois democratic process uses aspects of
majority rule and of consensus. But in the end,
at Shaker Mountain, when the vote was finally
taken, it would be acceptable if a decision were
made by 25 votes to 23. If nobody in the 23 felt
they needed to say why they voted the way they
did, or if nobody felt they needed to call for a
revote, then those 23 were doing what the
Quakers call “standing aside.” They could live
with the majority’s decision. But it also meant
that the minority didn’t have to pretend that
they agreed with everybody.
Our Iroquois process did take longer than the
usual democratic meeting. For example, I’m
always a little stunned when I go to the
Summerhill meetings and see how quickly they
make decisions. One of the things they tell me
is that if they make a decision that is not the
best one, they can then bring it up at a
subsequent meeting and reverse it, and this does
happen. At Shaker Mountain we spent a lot of
time in meetings, but I believe that the meeting
process is the most important educational
activity that happens in a school.
A variety of real-life situations are brought
into it and students have to develop a good
vocabulary to understand what everyone is
saying, and they develop good logical processes
and look at the potential consequences of their
actions.
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