What can educators do?

In this video, we’re going to discuss the logistics and the steps for implementing Appreciative Teaching Squares. I want to acknowledge the University of Calgary and their open access resource. That was really a starting point for us in infusing Appreciative Inquiry into Teaching Squares. So I highly recommend taking a look at that document and you’ll see echoes of their document in ours as well. So, there’s a supporting document for this video, which helps to supplement what we’re discussing here. So we’ll talk about the steps of the Appreciative Teaching Squares, and I’ll be very intentional about where we implemented Appreciative Inquiry into Teaching Squares.

So, step one is group formation. Now, this will be very dependent on whether you have a structure on your campus in order to help you support that group formation or not. If you have a center, like a Center for Teaching and Learning, or a flavor of that type of center, they will probably be able to help support you in creating a cross-disciplinary teaching square. If not, you can reach out to colleagues across campus or within your own department. But in general, I believe the richer teaching squares are ones where we can have those cross-disciplinary conversations.

So once that group is formed, the first step after that group formation is to get together either via Zoom or in person and have a conversation about surfacing your teaching strengths. So, this is an intentional incorporation of Appreciative Inquiry. In this step, you will interview each other about your teaching strengths, and there’s an interview guide that we’ll talk about in the next video, but is also included in the supplementary information. And the reason for that is because it helps to, when we tell stories to each other, it helps us to connect to each other. In addition, it helps to narrow the focus of when would be the most appropriate time for your colleagues to visit your course. So through the storytelling and conversation, you find a focus and a appropriate day and time to visit each other’s course.

Now, this is assuming this is a face-to-face or on-ground course. You can also adapt this for asynchronous courses as well to determine which module or section of the course would be a most appropriate in order for a visit. In addition, you can share appropriate materials like syllabi or assignments or any sort of documents that might be helpful in adapting and creating a context for the next step, which is what we call the appreciative course visit.

Now, the name of this step, again, is very intentional. For many of the faculty in our focus groups, they indicated that a course observation invoked kind of that feeling of evaluation. So instead, we call this step appreciative course visits. Now, this is where a colleague will, or a group of your colleagues within the Appreciative Teaching Square attend your course and reflect and take observations. Again, not with the aim of evaluation, but with the aim of your colleagues reflecting on their own teaching and appreciating your teaching strengths.

Now, once these course visits are complete, the group comes back together and has a reflective conversation. In that reflective conversation, you share what you appreciated from the course visits, and also you share what you might implement in your own courses. Now the last step is goal setting, and this is also very intentional. In the original foundational Teaching Squares, the process started with goal setting, whereas in Appreciative Teaching Squares, we end with goal setting. And that’s because we’re thinking towards our desired teaching future. How do we want to grow and strengthen as teachers? And how can we align professional development like watching perhaps another OneHE video or any professional development that’s available on your campus in order to reach that desired teaching future? I want to connect this last step of goal setting to the supporting documents that we provided as supplemental material.

Now, these are a few questions that you can use in order to set those goals, but they can be adapted to your own context. These are not questions that are set in stone, they’re just suggestions. So the first question is: What have you learned about your own teaching experience through the participation of the Appreciative Teaching Squares? The second question is: What are some actionable steps that I can take in order to meet those teaching goals of things that you’ve reflected on throughout the participation in the Appreciative Teaching Squares? And the last question is about trying to align professional development with those teaching goals. And what is a realistic timeline? So really trying to put into motion what you have learned throughout your time participating in an Appreciative Teaching Square.