Imagining future practices
Sometimes professional learning can feel a little transactional – I turn up, you tell me or show me something – I take it and may adopt it. Reflective inquiry practices often start from identifying a problem, issue, or gap (Cooperrider et al. 2008, Scott and Armostrong 2019). This can lead us to discard some ideas that don’t ‘fit’ easily with current practice, or directly 'solve' the identified issue however much we think they are valuable. The Appreciative Approach encourages us to go deeper and broader than these initial responses, to imagining different future practices (Watkins and Mohr 2001, Zandee 2013).
Activity: Imagining different practices (15 mins)
Using your stories from the previous activity, we are going to playfully explore how these can generate new possibilities for your context and practices.
Spend two minutes quickly skim reading your free writing story, using a different colour to highlight words or short phrases which excite, interest or feel full of potential to your practice.
Spend a further two minutes adding other words, connections, ideas to the bottom of your story. You may find it useful to think specifically about your context / practices when adding these additional notes.
Spend some time re-reading your writing and complete a series of 10–15 statements that start ‘I wonder’. The sentence starter can be used in different ways, including:
- I wonder if ...
- I wonder whether ...
- I wonder how we can …
- I wonder what would happen if ...
- I wonder what it would feel like for …
- I wonder who might …
- I wonder what accessing … might do to ….
Once you have written your statements, identify five that excite or intrigue you the most. Allow yourself to ‘wonder’ about the statements and their implications for a different practice in the future.