What does the research tell us?

The Teaching Squares were originally developed by Anne Wesley at St. Louis Community College, and have been adapted at several different institutions in order to promote teaching growth and conversation on campuses. Teaching Squares consist of four faculty members being a part of a group for either a semester or an academic year. You’ll also see Teaching Triangles, which just refers to three faculty being part of the community. The real point is to have at least three people in the group in order to promote different perspectives and having that shared teaching conversation.

The most recent publication by Friedman and colleagues describes several advantages to participating in a Teaching Square. He described those as having authentic observations, having the potential to develop peer mentoring relationships, a community of inquiry, structure for reflection, and also, it being a formative process. The process is overall low cost. It’s adaptable to several different disciplines and modalities of teaching, and it, again, promotes that shared conversation and community around teaching that is pretty rare on our campuses, depending on your context. Now, appreciative Teaching Squares use that foundation of Teaching Squares and implement that much more intentionally these principles of appreciative inquiry. Now, appreciative inquiry is a process for organizational change and social change that was developed in organizational psychology, but has been adapted to several different contexts, including higher education.

Now, I want to be clear that we are not implementing a full appreciative inquiry process into Teaching Squares, but important elements, and those elements include elements of narrative, elements of starting from a place of strength, developing a desired teaching future, so being really forward thinking, and providing those actionable steps in order to reach that desired teaching future. You’ll also see, in the supporting documents that are provided, that the language is very intentional, that it comes from a place of appreciation, and this infusion of appreciative inquiry came from faculty feedback in our focus groups. Faculty really enjoyed the structure of Teaching Squares, but they wanted to be that much more intentional in the format that it’s really clear how much of a privilege it is to visit each other’s courses, no matter the modality, and appreciate the strengths that we already have on our campuses.