Often times as agriculture teachers and FFA advisors you have to get creative to FIT it all in!
You are COACHES for CDE and LDE teams.
You are PROJECT MANAGERS for FFA activities.
You are TRAVEL AGENTS for trips.
You are PERFORMERS in the classroom.
And all of these jobs take TIME! Time away from your family. So how do you take your TIME back? You get creative!
One way to take back HOURS throughout the school year is to conduct a Hybrid Meeting. What does that even mean?
Let me explain!
Our chapter conducted the business meeting portion of FFA meetings virtually with a google form as a bell ringer in students’ normally scheduled class periods. 100% of students enrolled in agriculture education were FFA members, so this was easy for me at Houston, but you could easily give an alternate bell ringer focused on FFA to those non-FFA members.
These google forms had opening ceremonies, officer and committee reports, old business and new business. Since it was all on google forms, it was easy for me to make an assignment in google classroom and track if old and new business passed or failed.
Since we were able to quickly get through business, this allowed our officers to plan the social component of our meeting during our school’s Wildcat Time, which was the last 30 minutes of the day and served as a “homeroom” style class for students.
Some of these social components included: pumpkin carving, gingerbread houses, Easter egg hunts, knockout tournaments, trivia, etc.
For me, this way of doing FFA meetings allowed me to easily recapture 15+ hours a year in after school time devoted to FFA meetings and actually increased attendance because students didn’t need to find transportation before or after school.
Check out this example Virtual FFA Meeting Agenda to see how you can easily reframe the way you think about FFA meetings to get time back!
