Post-pandemic, the world is looking at how a virus could spread turmoil in the world. It has made us realize how shallow materialistic pleasures are in life. Before the Pandemic people in the world were worried about their jobs, the places they visited, the house they lived in, the school they studied, the cars they owned, the clothes worn by them, and what have you. Who would have thought that a mutant virus could crash the world economies and result in all people being locked up inside their homes? Yet, here we are, in this situation. Retrospection is key to understanding how to look forward with positivity and hope. What are our prospects then?
It is time to look at what changes we can make at our workplaces. So how do we start? The answer is simple:
So, lets us start at a place where we work - the school, with children, teachers, parents, and the community at large. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s foundational paper on positive psychology called for the promotion of “positive institutions” that is described as institutions that foster citizenship, virtue, and well-being. It is important for schools to be positive institutions especially since these students are the forthcoming generation who will go on to shape our society. Most schools do have some programs that cater to value education, character building, social-emotional learning, and positive education.
However, in today’s scenario using Appreciative Inquiry across the school to make changes will be helpful. Reynolds (School Effectiveness and School Improvement) argued that successful school change is created when it is approached as both a top-down and bottom-up process; where the top-down processes provide strategic direction and goal setting whilst the bottom-up processes involve diagnosis and action.
This is because inquiry sets up norms that allow for continual change by empowering school members to inquire, identify, solve, and continually revisit change. To complement the ideas, many writers in the field of school culture suggest that staff agency is a necessary condition for creating school change.
The stages of change adopted were:
These above principles were endorsed using appreciative inquiry as an overarching method to guide the strategic initiative.
What is Appreciative Inquiry and how does it work in a school?
Appreciative Inquiry is a relatively new approach for a successful school change. It is a systematic, holistic, and collaborative methodology that follows a strengths-based model of change in order to uncover the positive core of an organization (Cooperrider & Whitney). The purpose is to harness the power of collective positive emotions, school strengths and relationships of the members.
People from all levels of a school become part of an inquiry process that seeks to find the strengths in a system and to use those strengths as a platform to create change. Staff members are empowered and given agency to plan, make decisions, and take action in the change process by inquiring appreciatively into what gives life to their workplace, what works best, and what is possible.
According to Cooperrider and Whitney, the appreciative Inquiry approach is radically different from the more typical organizational development approaches to creating strategic change, which follows a deficit-based approach of diagnosing problems and errors in an organization and seeking to create change by fixing these errors. Let us look at a few approaches to comprehend this concept.
The Appreciative Inquiry Approaches: 4 D Cycle
One of the most common appreciative inquiry approaches is the 4-D cycle, which is anchored in a positive topic of inquiry:
The cycle is used to engage the entire school/organization’s members by systematically inquiring into strengths, successes, positive stories, resources, and capabilities.
- The discovery stage asks ‘What gives life?’ and is designed to assist the (school) organization’s members to discover the positive elements that already occur in the organization. Appreciation of the positive in the organization builds confidence for successful future change.
- The dream stage asks participants to imagine ‘What might be?’ and create a positive image of the future.
- The design stage prompts participants to think of ways the dream can be enacted and take shape.
- The destiny/deliver stage aims to create the urge in organizational members to take personal responsibility for change.
The team discusses co-operative ways to distribute the work to achieve the dream (Cooperrider & Whitney). Thus, the 4-D cycle can be used as an ongoing change process in longer-term organizational change initiatives.
Classroom Practices
The 4-D cycle can be brought into classroom practice as a way to create change with students. It can be used by teachers to design projects and it can be used in staff meetings and committees (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005).
Leaders through inquiry and collaboration find the strengths that can be built upon to create ongoing change. The theory of positive (school) organizational change, presented by Cooperrider and Sekerka (2003) and refined by Cooperrider (Cooperrider, 2012), suggests that AI fosters organizational change in three ways:
The members focus on and understand their work setting to see more of what is possible. The co-inquiry process into what is good about a school/organization creates amplified positive emotions in the Appreciative Inquiry participants, which then broadens their thinking and enhances their creativity regarding possible change initiatives. It also creates a sense of collective self-efficacy and builds up mutual regard, leading to increased social capital.
Practical Approaches for Schools to Venture into Appreciative Inquiry
The list is endless.
The strengths of a school/organization can bring about a positive impact in the working culture and bring out the creative juice of the teachers. The ownership and collaboration help in nurturing a positive and appreciative camaraderie. The fresh kinship combined with the clarity of strengths helps to activate collective energy, which creates a positive effect that spreads across the school culture.
A Wellness Programme: A School Initiative
The school may resort to a wellness programme and by using the 4-D cycle to generate ideas from staff about how to progress the wellbeing goal. The suggestions could be a positive psychology interest group, parent training courses on wellbeing, discussions on the scholastic report card, developing a formal wellbeing curriculum. Design of the wellbeing survey, results shared with staff, students and parents. Training teachers to adopt an evidence-based approach in their classes to assess the success of the wellbeing approaches. After all these suggestions the three stages of change would be development, implementation and monitoring the various changes the school would like to embark. Copland (2003) suggests that using an inquiry-based process sets up norms that allow for continual change by empowering school members to inquire, identify, solve, and continually revisit the wellbeing goal. In conclusion, this is one example in the field of educational leadership for schools to adopt more appreciative change approaches for schools to implement (Calabrese, San Martin, Glasgow, & Friesen 2008).
The NEP 2020
The NEP 2020 framework has many practices for the school leadership to commence a meaningful dialogue to make the necessary changes. Be it innovative pedagogy: transforming teaching and learning process, focusing on competency-based education, mental and physical health wellbeing, development of scientific temper, emphasis on digital literacy, SDG goals, critical thinking and creativity, emphasis on conceptual understanding, continuous assessment review and feedback, teacher efficacy and empowerment. These are just a few to mention. How do we get started to make changes in our school culture?
Well, appreciative inquiry is just one way to make a positive impact in the school culture thereby making changes in the student learning environment and in the community at large.
