You have to Accentuate the positives, eliminate the negative…
Now that I finally got caught up on the readings, I finally think I have a handle on the appreciative inquiry idea.It is not seperate to traditional evaluation but works hand and hand and focuses on positive approaches to evaluation. In my posting this week, I did spend the time to compare the two, both AI and traditional evaluation. I found alot more focus on AI obviously since it is the focus of our text in the book over traditional evaluation. But I almost find AI to be tricky in that it never looks at the negatives. Sometimes I think looking at faults of the program through traditional evaluation and makes it a better program because you know how to improve it and make it better. Yes a positive approach is great but I don’t know if it fully helps you identify the problems so that way you can know what to improve on.
For example, when I go around evaluating my students on their artwork, I always like to start out with a negative but then end with a positive note such as “Your drawing of the eye of the face could have been done better by using this stroke of the pencil, but you did a great job blending on the rest of the face.” This approach of turning a negative into a positive is identical to the may simularities and differences between AI and traditional evalution and how they work together.
