Introduction

No matter the flavor of our teaching appointment, teaching takes up a lot of our time, but how often do we get the opportunity to have formative feedback on our teaching, have cross-disciplinary conversations about our teaching, or get a time for, a lot of time for reflection on our teaching? I would argue, at least in my experience, not very often. Also, whenever I have a colleague visit my class, generally it is for evaluative purposes and sometimes there’s a conversation beforehand or after the observation, but in my experience, that hasn’t always been the case.

So what we’re proposing in this series of videos is appreciative teaching squares. It is a structure that came out of a project on our campus, where we were developing a multi measures approach to measuring teaching effectiveness. And what faculty indicated throughout the process, in terms of focus groups, was that they wanted more opportunities for growth in teaching before evaluation. So to that end, we talked about the structure of teaching squares. And again, through faculty feedback, they indicated that they wanted to see more of an appreciative approach to teaching squares.

So this series of videos discusses an appreciative approach to teaching squares. In short, teaching squares involves four faculty coming together as a group, either in a semester long group or throughout an academic year, in a way where they visit each other’s courses, either synchronously or asynchronously, and give each other, through the lens of reflection and appreciation. And the aim is to build our own teaching strengths, as opposed to giving evaluative feedback to our colleagues. And just to clarify, we are not incorporating a full appreciative inquiry, but elements of appreciative inquiry, which involves starting from a place of strength, incorporating narrative, and thinking about a desired teaching future. So, a really forward-thinking approach to building goals that are aligned with available professional development.