Welcome to this course ‘Reflecting on your Teaching with Appreciative Teaching Squares’ which has been developed with Erin Whitteck, former Professor and Educational Developer and, currently Science Communicator at Bayer, USA.
Click here to view the video transcript
My name is Erin Whitteck. I am one of the Assistant Directors in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in the United States of America. I am also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. As an educational developer, I am very passionate about context, and bridging the gap between education research, and implementing education research in practitioner’s context. To that aim, on our campus, I try to develop meaningful faculty development in the form of faculty learning communities. I also support a Students as Partners Program. The reason being, we consider our students to be context experts.
As a part-time or full-time faculty member, teaching at the college level can be a very lonely practice. It is sometimes rare within our institutions that explicit structures for reflection or community around teaching and learning exist. This course suggests an approach to building a semester or year-long teaching community of 2-3 peers to visit each other’s courses – not with the aim of evaluation or providing feedback – but instead with the lens of appreciation and reflecting on building on our own teaching strengths.
“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 feedback, through the lens of reflection and appreciation“
Get Involved And Share Your Learning
- Share your perspective. Throughout this course, you will see discussion prompts at the end of each lesson inviting you to share your thoughts and experience. We encourage you to respond to these discussion questions and read those of other educators to benefit from theirs. When you see a comment you agree with or find helpful, hit the ‘Like’ button to help other educators find it. You can also reply to any comments from other members that you find interesting.
- Ask a question. You can ask questions of experts and other educators in the discussion threads in courses.
- Pick up your course badges. To earn your Course Completion Badges make sure you mark all lessons as ‘Mark Complete’ once you have completed a lesson. At the end of the course, click ‘Mark Complete’ and you will be asked a few multiple-choice questions to earn a Course Completion badge. Once you’ve had a chance to apply your learning, come back to complete an Impact Badges by applying what you have learned in the courses and answering a short survey.
If you have any questions or issues, please email us at [email protected].