Playing to Your Strengths: Appreciative Inquiry as a Scholarly Tool for Your Computing Education Practice and Professional Development (Abstract Only)

In this workshop, we as a group use Appreciative Inquiry (AI) techniques to explore and develop our strengths as CS educators. As a participant, you will gain appreciation for your strengths as an educator, with concrete plans for building on these strengths. You will also learn about AI as a qualitative research methodology that is complementary to more common CS research methodologies, and that you can apply to evaluate and improve your own educational practice. Appreciative Inquiry drives change by building on what's already working well in an organization. Similarly to other qualitative methods, AI generates rich, deep feedback that is grounded in stakeholders' experiences, but in contrast to other methods its focus on strengths and positives surfaces unique, strength-based findings and make it an energizing and fulfilling approach to professional development and the scholarship of teaching and learning. AI is commonly used in education and organizational research and is an effective and community-building way to drive organizational or program change and positively impact participants' morale. We will share our materials and key tips to enable you to apply Appreciative Inquiry in your own work. You may wish to run Appreciative Inquiry workshops with students as an evaluation method, or run them with colleagues for professional development or for promoting positive change in your unit or program, or take smaller steps integrating the appreciative mindset into your teaching or other professional work.