Playing with a “Teaching Consultations Menu”

I discovered the book “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” by Tolu Noah (2025) through an interview on my favourite Tea for Teaching podcast, and it is such a treasure trove!

I am working on a summary where I apply many of the great suggestions to a course I am currently planning, but one idea I had to implement right away: A consultations menu (see featured image)! I think it is such a great way to be transparent about what people can expect from me. Often, when working with teachers, they are so extremely grateful for things that I consider part of my job rather than personal favours. Showing that all of these are “services” that I am getting paid for, that they can just ask me for without feeling bad, might lower the threshold to approach me for people who don’t know me yet?

So this is my first draft, and I will be playing with this some more!

Things that will definitely be different in the next version:

• While I think the food icons are fun on a “menu”, they don’t really fit with how I want to present myself. So they’ve got to go, but I still want something visually interesting, too, and also at least semi-related to the content, so I have to figure out what that will be.
• I am also not completely sold on the “menu” itself. I think it makes a lot of sense — starters are easy, formative feedbacks of different kinds, which can stand alone or lead into more collaboration; deserts are formative feedbacks on work that is almost finished that round up the effort on a piece; mains are bigger consultations; all-you-can-eats are larger collaborations likely over longer periods of time that very likely include at least a starter, main, and desert; drinks are short chats that may or may not lead to something else afterwards; and snacks are online resources for people that feel peckish but don’t want to commit to an actual conversation, or want to see what kind of stuff I do before approaching me. So it works really well, I am just not sure about the food associations.
• When I am putting stuff like this out on the internet, I should probably clarify that the “it’s part of my job” does not extend to all teachers worldwide, unfortunately, but to the ones working at LTH…
• It would be cool to connect each of the items with a bit more information of what people can expect. For example blogposts describing a specific example of when I did something similar!

It was also really fun to play with the menu, also to sharpen my profile. What do I want to include? What not? For example, GenAI did not make the cut (because I think that it’s not actually a problem in itself, it just amplifies existing problems). And I chose to put “inclusion” as a term, even though I really want nonclusion (because the problem with inclusion is that it is done to somebody by somebody!), because I wanted a term that people would recognise, but I am not really satisfied with that one yet.

So what do you think? Any ideas, suggestions, comments, feedback?

Noah, T. (2025). Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education. Taylor & Francis.

#TheWorkshopWheel