More thoughts on teaching consultations menus

When I first put together my Teaching Consultations Menu (see below; inspired by Noah (2025)’s awesome book), I discussed how I really liked the menu because of how easily it conveyed how different offers related to each other (starting out with reflections that can stand for themselves or lead into “main” consultations or projects, dessert that can follow after or could also just stand for itself, “snacks” where people consume what I have written, and “all you can eat” for the large projects that include a bit of all of the other categories), but that I really disliked the food association.

So when we started playing with putting together something similar for the Initiative “Teaching for Sustainability”, we tried to find some other imagery, and the theme of “growing” worked well in a first draft (see below).

But then I had the idea for a structure that is probably a lot more clear (even though the draft below is still horrible) — sorting what we offer into “who is it for” x “type of offer”.

Since we have someone working on the graphics and “making pretty”-side of the Initiative “Teaching for Sustainability”, I went ahead and looked if that structure could also work for my own menu — see below.

Here, in a future version, all the underlined words would be links (e.g. to my blog, social media, etc.) And I just realised that the colour scheme reminds me of my sister’s medical practice! But other than that, I think it works kind of fine. Not as well as for the Initiative “Teaching for Sustainability” because my work, at least the part where I am flexible, is more focussed on individuals. I do run courses regularly, but there isn’t so much wriggle room to tailor them to what people want for their group of colleagues, because booking those courses has to go through the official channels and approved by other people. And with the Initiative TfS, we are more flexible because we have (a little) more people power…

I’m still a little emotionally attached to the initial menu, despite the problematic food associations, because I really like the way that “starters” or “all you can eat” show the scope quite well. Maybe I can combine those two somehow?

Another idea to somehow capture how what I offer fits in the general process of improving teaching is to use the Lund pedagogical competence model by Olsson et al. (2010) and map my different offers on it. This is a quick and dirty mock-up. Danger here is that it gets super confusing if people are not already very familiar with the competence model and need to try to make sense of that while there is also the layer of all my stuff floating on top of it… But I like the general idea!

What I am really missing here compared to the matrix version that we developed for the initiative and that I did above for myself, too (the one that looks like my sister’s medical practice) is the explicit choice between consuming something alone or developing something in community, whether pre-existing or new. And that is a really important distinction I think, both to accomodate people’s preferences and constraints, and because while I think reading is a great and important start, eventually I want to nudge people towards community.

Alas, that point is still missing in the next version:

Here I rotated the experiential learning cycle by 180 degrees so it fits with this story line when we start to read from the top and go clockwise: I can offer a lot of input on pedagogical theories through my blog etc, but I can also offer informed pedagogical discussions in consultations, or — both combined — in my courses. For the planning point, I offer support for the full on SoTL experience, conversations about professional development, and a focus on the topics of Teaching for Sustainability and inclusive teaching. With regards to teachers’ teaching skills, I can help by observing and giving feedback, and with the whole reflection topic we can do that together based on what teachers tell me, what feedback they get from students, or what they have written up. Voilà!

I still think this might be a bit too messy with the learning cycle for people who aren’t familiar with it, but it is the competence model we work with… And I still miss a larger community-focus, but that would mostly come in through work that I do with the Initiative “Teaching for Sustainability”, and I don’t know how much of that should appear in my personal “menu”. More to think about here…

But not right now. If all goes according to plan, I will be busy with other projects for the next year or so, so I want to be a bit careful to not create more demand than I will be able to meet in the near future… But I have got to say, I really enjoyed this exercise and think that it is really worthwhile doing, both to figure out the actual topics that should go on the menu, but then also how to display them (e.g. focus on community vs focus on learning cycle). So I will be back to this topic!