Ducklows' Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry

Convention problem-solving techniques begin by identifying shortcomings or needs in the status quo (i.e., what does not exist, or what is not). Appreciative inquiry, on the other hand, identifies what is working in the status quo (i.e., what does exist, or what is). What is not can be translated into what might be (by replacing the problem with a new action that reduces or eliminates the problem), but what is can be translated into what might be, also (by enhancing or strengthening what works in the status quo).

Appreciative inquiry seeks to identify what gives life to organizations, and what activates people’s energies and competencies. As a result, examples, stories, and metaphors can be more important than fact and opinion statements. The communicative patterns that constitute appreciative inquiry, in turn, develop members’ commitment and confidence to their work.

citation: “Appreciative Inquiry: A Paradigm Shift for Social Systems,”accessed 24 July 2015, at http://theducklows.ca/downloads/AISystemsChange.pdf

Asking Not Telling: Edgar Schein on Humble Inquiry

My professional community project is about fostering trust and respect within the relationships between my educational colleagues. Edgar Schein, in his book Humble Inquiry, shows that trust is built when colleagues share vulnerabilities with each other.

For instance, in an interaction, when one person takes a risk by disclosing something, and the other person reciprocates that risk by disclosing something back, then they may develop trust between each other. In short, trust forms: (1) in communicative interactions, (2) when one person gives something, and (3) when the other person gives something back.

Schein claims we live and work in a culture of task-accomplishment (e.g., identifying problems and solutions) rather than a culture of relationship-building (cultivating trust and respect for our colleagues). This claim makes intuitive sense to me because it seems institutional changes on campus occur by designating committees who collect data showing a need for change and implement policy programs that will mitigate, reduce, or eliminate those needs. Building relationships as an approach to institutional change is not the norm.

Humble inquiry, the subject of Schein’s book, is an alternative approach to institutional change. Our conventional culture of “telling” (i.e., speaking to others in order to influence them) presumes that the speaker (the one doing the telling) knows about the other (the one doing the listening). Humble inquiry (i.e., listening to others in order to align our common purposes), on the other hand, presumes that we do not know the other, and that it’s important to ask (inquire) with an attitude of humility.

Humble inquiry asks open-ended questions in order to learn about the other: the questions are not loaded, the interactions are neither scripted nor ritualistic, and the answers are not preconceived.

The challenge for me and my project is to determine ways to supplement the institutional culture of my campus with humble inquiry. The current program of policy committees is not entirely consistent with humble inquiry. But my goal is not to replace one with the other; instead, it is to enhance the current program with alternatives that might bring slow and steady improvements.

citation: Edgar H. Schein. Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler, 2013.

Judith Warren Little on the Relationship between Professional Community and Professional Development

Judith Warren Little’s essay “Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School” is a significant essay for its description and justification of professional community at an educational institution. Little's essay is directed at K-12 education, but I think her comments may apply to college campuses as well.

The essay gives abundant food-for-thought about the nature of professional development and how it meshes with professional development. My summary will be selective and I’ll report only the ideas that are most relevant to my project.

A significant change in educator professional learning is a shift from individual expertise and commitment to the institution’s expertise and commitment. In other words, previously most professional development aimed to improve educators’ teaching skills; whereas nowadays educators engage in professional learning mostly to serve a larger goal of institutional improvement (e.g., improving student success).

A shift from an individual educators’ development plan to the development of the whole educational institution as a whole occurs because the institution is the entity responsible for student success. A resulting implication is that professional learning should be a social endeavor rather than an individual and solitary activity.

Little argues that professional community is a necessary part of any successful school. In fact, as professional community becomes an integral component of student success, the very essence of professional development evolves into a broader and deeper sense of professional learning. Unfortunately, many of these beneficial changes are conceptual and theoretical rather than practical and actual.

At the same time, the concepts of cooperation and collaboration shouldn’t be confused with professional community. Accomplishing tasks together (i.e., cooperation and collaboration) does not mean the same thing as developing trust, respect, and a mutual responsibility for student learning (i.e., community).

Because professional community can be difficult to preserve, specific communication practices, and interactional resources and protocols can help educators create and maintain professional community. Furthermore, educators must embrace and enact values that support learning.

The relationship between professional development (i.e., techniques to enhance teaching) and professional community (i.e., cultivating trust and respect) is a reciprocal relationship. Successful professional learning is a combination of professional development and professional community.

And that leads to my own personal thesis: professional learning = professional development plus professional community. Or, put another way: PL = PD + PC.

citation: Judith Warren Little. “Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School.” Washington, DC: National Education Assn., Dec. 2006. http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/mf_pdreport.pdf

Linda Shadiow on Stories as Faculty Learning (part 2)

In my previous post, I summarized the first half of Linda Shadiow’s book What Our Stories Teach Us, and described how educators can use stories as a tool for professional learning. This is accomplished by, first, identifying stories of “critical moments” within our professional life, and second, analyzing those stories to uncover their significance. Now I'll continue this summary by describing the process of locating the underlying ideology revealed by the story.

Once you have identified a story and analyzed it, the third step is to use the story to identify the claims and assertions underlying your educational practices. Specifically, you try to understand what your story reveals about what you think about education, about yourself, about your methods and teaching style, and about your students. In short, your story exemplifies values, and you want to figure out what those values are and what they mean.

A story’s values are disclosed through (among other things) turning points in the story (moments that mark a clear before-and-after sequence in the plot), dialectical tensions, and dissonances. For example, stories may exemplify tensions or disconnects between opposing inclinations such as: intentions to act vs. actual behavior, what an educator wants to do vs. what they should do, actions that are good for us vs. actions that are good for students, and routine or ordinary events vs. extraordinary or unusual events.

The benefit of story analysis is that it shows to us the frameworks that underlie our teaching practices. Thereby we have a better feel for which of those frameworks we want to keep in place or strengthen, and which one we might want to reconsider or change.

And then, ironically, analyzing our stories of educational moments creates new stories (i.e., that time we analyzed our stories) that we reflect upon and share later on.

Shadiow also presented many of these ideas at a POD Network (Professional and Organizational Development Network) conference in 2010. The conference materials show that the session followed the book by encouraging session participants to identify an educational story, analyze the story for its components, and search for the underlying frameworks revealed by the story.

In the session description, Shadiow argues that educators may seek to make positive changes in their mid-career teaching practices, but may not have an easy way to accomplish that change. The solution, she offers, is to apply an auto-ethnographic analysis of one’s teaching stories to uncover or excavate the ideology or framework that allows for change.

The remaining pages of the conference session materials include handouts and worksheets that show the kind of story analysis she advocates throughout her book.

citations:

Linda K. Shadiow. What OurStories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Linda K. Shadiow. “CriticallyReflective Teaching: Excavating Assumptions and Pratices.” POD AnnualConference, St. Louis, Nov. 2010.

Linda Shadiow on Stories as Faculty Learning (Part 1)

Linda Shadiow's book What Our Stories Teach Us is an exploration of the role of story and narrative in faculty development. She provides a thorough program for analyzing teaching stories in order to learn from them and improve our educational practices.

Early in the book Shadiow establishes a three-part pattern for working with stories in a professional development context: identify, then analyze, then interpret and use stories. In this post I describe the first of these steps and part of the second step; a later blog post will pick up where this post leaves off.

Shadiow begins by explaining why faculty should want to use stories as a part of their professional learning. In short, stories are an integral part of our teaching identities (our identities as educators). Professional development means we improve our use of skills, but more directly, professional development means we understand and change our teaching identities and our persona.

Analysis of stories helps us uncover and understand the assumptions we make that structure our teaching practice. Put another way, stories help us get at the autobiographical roots of our educational practice. In this way I can't help but think of stories as like anthropological artifacts of our educational ideologies.

Analysis of our teaching stories leads to what Shadiow calls "double-loop learning" which is hunting and questioning our pedagogical assumptions (as opposed to "single-loop learning" which is increasing our teaching efficiency via new teaching techniques).

Once we are convinced that collecting and using stories is an important part of our professional learning, we then need to collect and code those stories for their content. As part of this process, good questions to ask are: Why did you choose this particular story to tell? Why has this story stayed with you? Of all the stories you could tell, why did you choose to tell this particular story in this particular context?

Once you have selected a story to analyze, you move on to identifying patterns within the stories. Stories are made up of settings, plot events, and characters. The characters of our stories can be especially interesting; we should keep in mind there are multiple versions of us in and around the stories we tell. There is the individual who is telling the story and there is the individual who the story is about. There is us the protagonist; us the narrator; us the learning and us the teacher; us the self as we were back then and us the self as we are today.

In a later blog post, I'll continue this summary of Shadiow's book by describing more about story analysis and how to locate the assumptions that structure the educator's ideology.

citation: Linda K. Shadiow. What Our Stories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Jean Connelly & Michael Clandinin on Stories within Narrative Inquiry

While this article mostly deals with narrative inquiry (which is largely tangential to my project on professional community), the authors do make four claims about story that can illuminate the nature and use of narrative in faculty development.

First, humans are storytellers who lead storied lives. I get two ideas--both related but still different--out of this sentence. One, humans as storytellers means we "naturally" tell stories or find it easy to do so, perhaps because we are so conditioned to it. Two, story is a way we make sense out of, or give meaning to, the seemingly random chronology of events that make up our lives. Insofar as being educators is part of our lives, stories give meaning to our work as educators.

Second, narratives add causality to the flow of life events. Again, here's my take: one of the ways we give meaning to our lives--as well as to our work as educators--is to construct cause-and-effect chains that help us understand influence and how things happen. We not only want to know what happened, but more importantly we want to know why. Causality helps explain why.

Third, the meaning of story is not in the events themselves but in the change from start to end. I've said twice above that stories are part of the meaning-making process we use to reflect upon our lives and our work. The events themselves are the individual plot moments within a story; the but the change from beginning to end shows the larger and longer arc of influence that runs through our work as educators. What events in a story are not as important as what those events mean.

And fourth, stories address general problems, but within specific instances. The things that are important to us are likely to be the things that happen to us over and over--the patterns of events we don't understand or that create problems. But solving problems or answering questions can't be done well on such a large and abstract scale because every situation and every person is different. Stories allow us to explore the "big questions" but in a way that doesn't get lost in abstractions and generalities. Stories are always about a specific instance of something happening; we generalize the specifics and the moral of the story to the general patterns of our lives.

citation: Micheal Connelly & D. Jean Clandinin. "Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry." Educational Researcher 19.5 (Jun.-Jul. 1990): 2-14.