The university-governed English language center where we work has a culture of reflective teaching for the faculty and continuous quality improvement for the staff. As part of this tradition, we recently implemented a professional development program during a time of substantial organizational change focusing on communication, conflict resolution, and team leadership skills. We used an appreciative inquiry (AI) approach for the program design. The participants included the professional staff, the support staff, and faculty with administrative responsibilities, a total of 12 team members in addition to the director. The eight women and four men had 1–22 years of service (with an average of 7 years), two were serving in new positions, and four had recently received promotions to new responsibilities.

Here we describe the program and its outcomes, with views of the experience from the perspectives of the director (Hoekje) and a member of the staff (Lahai). Overall, we endorse the approach as a first step in delivering a strengths-based professional development experience for staff at the center and recommend it to other organizations in the values-driven field of international education.

Appreciative Inquiry

AI promotes organizational change and development by identifying shared values and organizational strengths, and supporting the core ethos and values of the organization. Organizational development occurs around the organization’s “positive core” through the “4-D” process of “discover, dream, design, and destiny” (Cooperrider, n.d.).

We began the discovery process by defining the administrative staff at the center as a team with a shared core vision and values. To gather information about our vision and values, our facilitator interviewed each team member separately to gather rich data on individual perceptions. Interviews focused on organizational strengths and values, the contributions of self and others to the functioning of the team, formal and informal strategies in place to manage stress and conflict, and optimal times of organizational functioning. Members were encouraged to “dream” the future, for example, to imagine that our organization was recognized with a major award: What would it be for?

Salient themes that emerged from the interviews included the staff’s strong endorsement of the mission and standards of the center and the work ethic and investment of all team members. Representative comments included:

• “We are passionate about our mission.”
• “Our center has high standards, high quality programs.”
• “Everyone works extremely hard to get the job done.”
• “[We are] student centered; we make a difference to students on campus; we help students achieve their goals.”
  
  

The discovery process also uncovered stressors that interrupted our ability as a team to enact our mission. These included intense pressures from student needs and cultural differences; the urgency and time pressure to complete work; confusion around changing lines of responsibility; differences in working styles and personalities; and unresolved issues of miscommunication, avoidance, or conflict. This information was shared privately with the director and the faculty chair of the organizing committee.

The next step was to design a development program that would build on our strengths and represent the hard facts about the stressors. We also hoped that it would provide opportunity for teambuilding, creativity, and even fun!

The facilitator designed the workshop and recommended that it be held over one extended day to ensure that all team members could participate. We scheduled the event outside the center in an on-campus room easily accessible to the faculty club, where we ate lunch. The program began by identifying key themes and values from the interview data. Having this information expressed anonymously in the aggregate built a picture of a highly committed team deeply invested in the values and mission of the organization. Next, we broke into groups to represent these themes and values through drawings, role-plays, and scenarios. This provided an opportunity to unleash our creativity and to process the information in multimodal ways.

In the next segment, we heard individual (anonymous) experiences that included some of the stressors of work at the center. A continuing theme was timing and tone of requests to each other, both via email and face-to-face when entering another’s workspace. Hearing this information as a group helped us to see patterns of organizational communication rather than focus on individual interactions.

We returned in the afternoon for a skills-building workshop on cultural and individual styles of communication and, perhaps most usefully, a discussion on individual strategies used to respond to stress and the functionality of these strategies. In the final wrap-up session, we considered how the “destiny” of the organization could evolve through an ongoing culture of AI and our own commitments to this process.

Two Perspectives

Hoekje: From my perspective as director, confirming the value in our organizational culture and mission as a team was a beneficial approach to staff development as our commitment to our work is a great strength of our organization. The interview stage of the process provided a depth to the work that allowed us to address stressors from this strengths-based perspective. I also realize that developing an ongoing culture of appreciative inquiry (the “destiny” phase) is a long-term process that we have just begun as an organization. In the workshop, I came to understand aspects of my own communication that would assist the staff as well as ways to support the organizational communication as a whole.

Lahai: From the perspective of a long-term staff member, I felt the AI process as the staff experienced it was a good first step in trying to better understand our coworkers. However, we felt some confusion as to the purpose of the process. Like some, I went into the process somewhat guarded while others saw an opportunity to open up about issues they faced. The interviews provided an opportunity for me and the other staff to reflect on our roles and on how the center operates as a team. It provided a rare opportunity for us to air our concerns while acknowledging each other’s contributions to the team. The review and discussion of the interview data was productive and led us to develop strategies that continue to help us better communicate with each other. One notable change has been an increased awareness of timing (this was often a point of potential conflict). Overall, the process has helped me be more aware of and appreciative of the work my colleagues do. Once I realized that we’re all working toward the same goal, the focus has been to learn to adapt to differing work styles and attitudes. A follow up is definitely needed to continue team building and address any further issues.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Several recommendations come from our experience:

1. The goals of the AI program need to be clearly defined, including expectations around sharing “difficult” issues honestly and productively. A program-wide approach to AI, complete with a study group, readings and discussions, and joint development of goals and workshop design could have created greater understanding, and this approach might be useful for the next step in developing an organizational culture of AI.
2. A 1-day workshop had some advantages, but it was tiring for the facilitator and the participants. We recommend two or three shorter workshops so that energies could be more focused.
3. The relationship of the skills-building communications topics should have been more closely linked with specific issues in the interviews. A series of workshops would have allowed more specific follow-up to the first stage of discovery and dreaming and more ongoing staff investment into the design stage.
4. Regular follow-up is needed to continue the momentum. Transformation of the organization envisioned through AI is at the personal as well as organizational level, but it is not a familiar approach to most of us within the current professional development environment, in which professional development is framed as an individual activity.
   
   

Final Thoughts for the IEP Community

As members of the IEP community, we are on the front lines in often sensitive and challenging situations. We work extended hours and schedules throughout the year compared to many school programs. Yet our mission is meaningful and rewarding. Approaching our work through the lens of AI allowed us to see the value of our work as a team in focusing on the basic questions: What do we do best as an organization? What keeps us from getting to our best? How do we support each other to keep doing our best? This lens provided a valuable perspective that has given long-lasting support to our work.

Resources

For more information and resources on appreciative inquiry, see

• The Appreciative Inquiry Commons
• The Center for Appreciative Inquiry
  
  

References

Cooperrider, D. (n.d.). What is appreciative inquiry? Retrieved from http://www.davidcooperrider.com/ai-process/

Barbara Hoekje, PhD, is associate professor of communication at Drexel University, where she directed the English Language Center from 2001–2015. Her work focuses on sociolinguistic approaches to language program management, language assessment, and language use.

Massah Lahai is the communications coordinator at Drexel English Language Center. She has a BA in psychology from UC Davis and her MA in urban education from Temple University. Her current work focuses on international student recruitment and marketing for the English Language Center.