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Appreciative Teaching Squares are really a mindset shift. Generally, on most campuses when we visit colleagues’ courses, this comes from an evaluative lens, whereas in appreciative teaching squares, what we’re doing is building a teaching conversation and a community across campus. And from feedback from faculty, it was very important that this process of appreciative teaching squares was delineated from evaluation and feedback. Now, this doesn’t mean that you might have a conversation about feedback in the reflective conversation but the lens of going in and doing an appreciative course visit and having that reflective conversation needs to be appreciative in order to build that shared conversation and community.
As faculty, and humans, it is natural to face challenges as problems to be solved. The issue with that approach is that teaching, and teachers, are not problems to solve. It is a mindset and perhaps a culture shift to visit a colleague’s course with a lens of appreciation instead of evaluation. It takes a lot of effort to reserve judgment and instead focus on the strengths of both the design, implementation, and experience of a course. However, this lens of appreciation has the potential to infuse more joy into our teaching and cultivate a conversation about the wonderful teaching that is already happening on our campuses to counter the rhetoric of what is deficient in ourselves and our students.
Discussions
What elements of appreciative teaching squares are appropriate for your context?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.