Appreciative Inquiry: Conversations worth having

Posted on August 22, 2020 by admin

Our new Head of Campus introduced me to ‘Appreciative Inquiry’. Here is an oft cited definition of what ‘AI’ is: “At its heart, AI is about the search for the best in people, their organizations, and the strengths-filled, opportunity-rich world around them. AI is not so much a shift in the methods and models of organizational change, but AI is a fundamental shift in the overall perspective taken throughout the entire change process to ‘see’ the wholeness of the human system and to “inquire” into that system’s strengths, possibilities, and successes. ” ^a

I read the book “Conversations Worth Having” ^b on Scribd. This is a subscription service, you pay $9 AUD a month and get fantastic access to books, documents and podcasts. I like reading non-fiction on Scribd because of the easy highlighting you can do with both Scribd and Diigo. I like Scribd better than Audible and Amazon.

What is ‘Appreciative Inquiry’?

AI can be the catalyst for organisational or behavioural change and can be used in all situations where humans interact. Stavros describes it as follows: “AI consists of the cooperative search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them and that solving tough problems from that perspective results in creative solutions, which is life-giving for people.” ^c The idea of Appreciative Inquiry resonates with me because I try to always take a strengths based approach in my dealings with people and the world, rather than a deficit approach. I try to see the best in people, situations and organisations. AI is all about looking at strengths, rather than weaknesses and deficits.

Appreciate inquiry is so called because you ask questions about and investigate what is good. Your inquiry appreciates and builds on the good and the successful, rather than identifying and investigating what is negative and wrong. Continue reading “Appreciative Inquiry: Conversations worth having”

Excerpt from: Stavros, Jacqueline, Godwin, Lindsey, & Cooperrider, David. (2015). Appreciative Inquiry: Organization Development and the Strengths Revolution. In Practicing Organization Development: A guide to leading change and transformation (4th Edition), William Rothwell, Roland Sullivan, and Jacqueline Stavros (Eds). Wiley, source (back)
Link to Conversations Worth Having on Scribd: . https://www.scribd.com/book/375406194/Conversations-Worth-Having-Using-Appreciative-Inquiry-to-Fuel-Productive-and-Meaningful-Engagement (back)
From Conversations Worth Having, Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful, Engagement, Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres. Page unknown because I took notes in Scribd via Diigo, which didn’t include page numbers, further citations will just be “Conversations worth having” (back)

Quality Teaching Rounds: Talking about great teaching

Posted on March 29, 2020 by admin

Quality Teaching Rounds, developed by Jenny Gore and Julie Bowe, involves teachers working in professional learning communities (PLCs) of four or more to observe and analyse each other’s teaching (Bowe & Gore, 2017) ^a. The QTR is a protocol using a set of “good teaching practice” criteria with which a lesson is “coded” and then discussed by a group of three or four teachers. The three dimensions and 18 elements are grouped in three domains of good pedagogy: Intellectual Quality, Quality Learning Environment and Significance.

How it works:

A group of four teachers (three could work, but four is optimal) observe a lesson by one of the group. The three observers “code” the lesson using the Quality Teaching criteria. After the lesson, the group of four get together and discuss the lesson. The discussion is not an appraisal of the teacher; it is about discussing the elements of good teaching.

Below are my notes of an excellent two day PD I was lucky enough to attend ^b, guided by Professor Jenny Gore. She was insightful, interesting and showed us how the QTR model is one of the few ways in which teachers can have safe and constructive discussions based on lesson observations.

I have blogged about Jenny Gore’s QTR before, but at that time, I didn’t fully get how useful and great this protocol actually is. Now I do, and I can’t wait to start working with it at my school. Here is the blog post from June 2016.
Continue reading “Quality Teaching Rounds: Talking about great teaching”

https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1336&context=research_conference (back)
On the 25th and 26th of February 2020, at Lauriston Girls’ School (back)

Evaluating Professional Development

Posted on February 29, 2020 by admin

My school is currently trialing and evaluating different forms and modes of professional development. I did some reading to gain perspectives on how to evaluate the effectiveness of professional development.

I read two articles about PD evaluation, both by Thomas Guskey, who seems to have made this his academic niche.

Article 1: What Works in Professional Development?

Abstract of “What works in Professional Development“: ^a A research synthesis confirms the difficulty of translating professional development into student achievement gains despite the intuitive and logical connection. Those responsible for planning and implementing professional development must learn how to critically assess and evaluate the effectiveness of what they do.” You can read the article with detailed comments by a broad group of educators here: https://kami.app/J15eQMqxFzOk.

While this article is interesting, it is also questionable because its quite considerable conclusions seems to rest from just 9 ‘valid’ studies. All the other studies were dismissed because of problems with the methodology. So; it is too hard to do valid studies into the efficacy of Professional Development and its impact on student outcomes? Can we make any statements about the impact of PD on student outcomes? Jenny Gore would say she has evidence for the effectiveness of the Quality teaching rounds model.

Continue reading “Evaluating Professional Development”

What Works in Professional Development?
Guskey, Thomas R.; Yoon, Kwang Suk
Phi Delta Kappan, v90 n7 p495-500 Mar 2009
https://tguskey.com/wp-content/uploads/Professional-Learning-5-What-Works-in-Professional-Development.pdf Accessed 29/02/20 (back)

Better conversations, Jim Knight

Posted on February 15, 2020 by admin

I have really enjoyed reading Jim Knight’s “Better Conversations”. It is inspirational in the way it makes you mindful of what we do all day: Talk. We talk at, about, with and to each other. We all know how great it feels to have a truly wonderful, productive and invigorating conversation. What if more of our conversations could be even better? Knight provides some common sense approaches, but to call it ‘common sense’ is unfair because if having great conversations is common sense and easy, then why do we have bad/unproductive conversations, or conversations which could have been better?

I picked the 5 chapters I found most interesting and relevant, and used the mindmaps Knight provides at the beginning of each chapter as my guide to form my own notes and understanding. For this I used the software package MindJet Mindmanager, which our school provides for our students and created this mindmap overview: Better conversations Jim Knight (also see below)

Better conversations (Ch1)
The Better Conversations Beliefs (Ch 2)
Ask better questions to foster inquiry (Ch5)
Redirecting toxic words and emotions (Ch8)
Building Trust (Ch9)

My key takeaways: Continue reading “Better conversations, Jim Knight”

A week on #edutweetoz, in polls

Posted on December 7, 2019 by admin

Twitter continues to be my favourite form of professional development. The networking and ideas I get from it are just invaluable to my teaching practice. I had another go at hosting @edutweetoz for a week (from 24/11/19 till 01/12/19). It was great fun, but it also made me realise how used I am to my own posse of people on Twitter. It felt quite different to interact with a whole new (and much bigger) group of people. One of my themes for the week was to run lots of polls because they are easy to interact with and can start some interesting conversations. Below are the polls I ran. Some interesting data about the working life of teachers:

43% of respondents work through recess
45% of respondents stay at work until after 5pm
47% of respondents eat lunch at their desk
65% of respondents use Sunday to prep for Monday
77% of respondents are a member of a teachers union

See more polls below, in random order: Continue reading “A week on #edutweetoz, in polls”

PD Bingo

Posted on September 7, 2019 by admin

Here is a great way to diversify the professional development offerings at your school. During Term 3, I held a ‘PD Bingo’, based on an idea by @nbgreene, found via @cultofpedagogy (also see bottom of post).
This Bingo poster contained a mix of 24 teaching ideas, strategies and PD choices. The aim was to inspire staff to try new things, and to get a sense of what they found easy or challenging to implement in their classes or in PD. I got the Bingo sheet printed on A2 size and hung it in the staff room for 3 weeks. Here is what it looked like:

Many staff members participated and it got some great conversations going. Below is an analysis of the results: Continue reading “PD Bingo”

My booksnap notes of: “Why don’t students like school?” By Daniel Willingham

Posted on January 17, 2019 by admin

Over the last few weeks I read ‘Why don’t students like school’ by Daniel Willingham. It was a very popular book when it was published in 2009. Willingham is a professor of Psychology with a specialisation in neuroscience, and I appreciated having these ideas about how the brain learns presented in such an accessible way, although it was a bit too narrative at times for my liking.

While reading I like to make visual booksnaps using Piccollage. This strategy allows the information to rattle around in my working memory a bit longer; I DO something with the info which means that it will (hopefully) be stored better in my long term memory. Willingham explains this in Chapter 1, page 10, “How thinking works”.

I print the booksnaps off and will refer to them occasionally to remind myself of what I have read. You can download all of them here in one PDF.

This book is also part of the holiday reading for the Twitter #edureading group.
All the info you need can be found here: sites.google.com/view/educational-reading-group/

Here are my booksnap notes: Continue reading “My booksnap notes of: “Why don’t students like school?” By Daniel Willingham”

Protected: IB TOK Workshop, Day 1

Posted on August 21, 2018 by admin

IB History IA workshop, Day 3

Posted on June 27, 2016 by admin

Work in progress! These are my notes from a three day workshop for the IB History IA (New course), held at Wesley College Melbourne, on June 25, 26, 27, 2016.

Day 3, Session 9, Designing an effective IA process, ideas, skills and strategies.

No name, no school names, no city name, no student number on the front page, the IA has to be uploaded completely anonymous. Only have the title on the front page.

We discussed our current IA practices and the ways in which we’d like to change those in the future. For me, I’d like to start earlier with finding a good research question. Formulating a good question is very challenging, so as soon as this workshop finalises the online student resource, I will introduce the students to it and will use some lessons to work on the RQ.

PDF version of the poster here: Poster PDF

Continue reading “IB History IA workshop, Day 3”

IB History IA workshop, Day 2

Posted on June 26, 2016 by admin

Work in progress! These are my notes from a three day workshop for the IB History IA (New course), held at Wesley College Melbourne, on June 25, 26, 27, 2016.

My notes for Day 2 will be shorter because there was far more reading of sections and more discussion about marks awarded.

Day 2, Session 5: Section 3 – Reflection

The reflection is not in terms of content, but in terms of process. The student is the historian.

Section 3: Reflection

This section of the internal assessment task requires students to reflect on what undertaking their investigation highlighted to them about the methods used by, and the challenges facing, the historian. Examples of discussion questions that may help to encourage reflection include the following. Continue reading “IB History IA workshop, Day 2”

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Thinking, Learning, Teaching by @vanweringh

Tag: professional development