Beverly Peters

Greetings! I’m Beverly Peters, an evaluator with over 25 years’ experience, mainly in southern Africa. As an Assistant Professor at American University, I teach online evaluation courses in Measurement and Evaluation.

I am very cognizant when I teach evaluation that I am training graduate students who will in the future be conceptualizing, implementing, and/or evaluating programs aimed in one way or another at improving people’s lives. This is a privilege and responsibility I take seriously, as my students will one day be decision makers who will likely have the power to change people’s lives. I have a mere semester to share practical experiences, to stress to students that as outsiders in another community or even culture, they must think through their role and the expected and unexpected consequences of their actions. I need to find ways to stress that even if we are engaging in participatory development and evaluation processes, the evaluator, the outsider, is oftentimes the one making decisions that impact other people’s social or economic development. This is what I have called the unwelcome power of the evaluator, and an important opening for me to mentor students on how to act ethically, responsibly, and professionally.  These are aspects which, difficult to learn from a textbook, I seek to integrate into interactions I have with students.

How does this relate to your work as an evaluator? Even if you do not teach evaluation courses, I venture to guess that many of you act as mentors or even train evaluation teams. How can you ensure that you encourage and train novice evaluators to act ethically, responsibly, and professionally? How can you encourage them to consider the unwelcome power of our profession?

Here’s what I have learned from more than two decades of teaching.

Hot Tips and Cool Tricks:

• Approach mentees as colleagues, finding organic ways to prepare them for evaluation careers in a changing interdependent world where they may, for better or worse, have the power of the evaluator.
• Respect mentees as adults who will one day make decisions that will impact the lives of others. Encourage their independent thinking, but give relevant feedback. Always encourage mentees to consider perspectives other than their own.
• Create space for mentees to interact with you, so that mentoring, feedback, and growth become natural and exponential.
• Challenge mentees with real life scenarios so that they consider their roles as evaluators, and how they would act ethically in any given situation.
• Be approachable, yet aim to identify the mentees’ professional goals and shortcomings, providing advice for them to build the skills necessary to excel in evaluation today.

If even for a brief moment, your interactions with your evaluator mentees cause them to hesitate and ask what their role would be; how they can take into account local level perspectives; and how they can make a difference in the ways that we conceptualize and interact with others from diverse cultures and backgrounds, then you have been successful as a mentor and an evaluator.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

mentoring

Hi, everyone! I’m Sara Vaca, independent consultant and AEA365 Outreach Coordinator and Creative Advisor.

Some weeks ago, I was approached by four graduate students from the University of Rochester (pursuing the Master’s degree in Program Evaluation), who had been tasked with interviewing a practicing evaluator and had chosen me to know about my career as an evaluator (!). At the end of the interview, they asked me if I could give them some tips for entering the evaluation field – which inspired me to do this post.

Rad Resources: I know others have already written about this issue. I could easily recap these 4 posts with great tips:

• AEA365’s Derrick Gervin on Tips for New Evaluators
• AEA365’s Ayesha Tillman on Advice to New Evaluators
• Ann-Murray Brown’s post on How to Have a Career in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) with No Prior Experience
• Deven Wisner’s post New to Evaluation? Here are tips for plugging in!

Hot Tips: I totally agree with the good advice given by my colleagues. But in case, if my particular mix helps someone, here they are:

1. Try to get invited to an evaluation

Getting the first contracts when you have no experience feels sometimes like mission impossible. If you know an evaluator, you try to get him/her to “invite” you to an evaluation, even if it is as an intern.

2. Offer something new

The sooner you identify your passion and start developing content about it, even if it is just theoretical, the sooner you may get specialized in something you like… and people may start hearing about you.

3. Go to conferences

Do not expect to have fun immediately though (my first one, AEA2013, was a bit of a disaster), but ever since I feel I’m on my planet every time!

4. Talk to your heroes

The evaluation field is unique in so many ways. One of them is that your favorite authors are your contemporaries and go to the conferences too (or have social media). So carefully find what to share or ask or talk about, and encourage yourself to say hi to them.

5. Engage into pro bono stuff

Although the time that I devote to it has decreased now that I regularly have paid contracts to work on, I still engage into (too) many initiatives and ideas that do not involve money. I do it to learn and for fun, as I can choose what I commit to and who I work with with great freedom. Writing papers, preparing to present at conferences and other collaborations are a key part of my self-development strategy and it is clearly interconnected with my evaluation practice.

6. Have a website

You will obviously have to send your CV to apply to offers, but I have found that having a website of your own often reinforces your image and help people trust you. Also, if you have a blog in it, you can pour your work and passion in it!

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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Hi, we’re Audrey McIntyre and Michael Prideaux. We recently completed internships at The Improve Group, an evaluation consulting firm based in Minnesota.

As new evaluators, we have interesting perspectives from serving on evaluation teams during our internships. We worked with The Improve Group colleagues and clients on projects for the Angel Foundation, the Highland Friendship Club, and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. In our work, we were truly members of the evaluation teams: We designed surveys and conducted interviews, analyzed data, and helped clients understand the findings.

Lesson Learned: Communication is key

One of the main avenues to success in an evaluation project team is strong communication. That extends to sharing core values. If you’re working from the same premise to the same goal, you only have to figure out the steps in between, rather than also having to put in time to determine a shared starting point.

Aside from moving a project forward, we found that strong communication allows team members to learn from each other. Especially being new to evaluation, we really valued hearing others’ ideas on projects and learned a lot just from listening to what our team members suggested. We met regularly with organization leaders about our projects to co-develop ideas on how to engage clients – it was through these meetings that we, too, were able to contribute our ideas and perspectives to The Improve Group’s work.

Hot Tip: Take full advantage of bright, engaged interns on evaluation teams

By being integrated into The Improve Group’s project work, we were able to contribute fully to the organization. Often organizations delegate less interesting tasks, like data entry, to interns. And while that is an important skill to grow, and we did do some data entry, we also did a lot of brainstorming, problem-solving, and development of things that made a difference and contributed to the team – which is what we loved the most.

Working on projects as interns also allowed us to be contributing to a larger goal as we were learning. Take Audrey’s contributions to The Improve Group’s project providing technical assistance and program evaluation to Minnesota Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs grantees as an example. She had some experience with data analysis at the time, but not enough to think of half the things the team suggested regarding how to analyze, visualize, and report the information we had gathered. If she hadn’t worked on a team, she wouldn’t have been able to do the good work she did on that project.

Rad Resource:  AEA’s Graduate Education Diversity Internship program provides paid internship and training opportunities during the academic year. Additional internship opportunities are posted on local AEA affiliate sites in April each year.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Evaluation Teams Week. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Graduate Education Diversity Internship Program

What’s up! We are Gwendolyn Baxley and Larry D. Brown Jr., doctoral students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and evaluators as part of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative Clinic. The Clinic responds to the small-scale evaluation needs by matching trained graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with schools and education-focused community organizations in Dane County.

As graduate students, there are many benefits to engaging as professional evaluators, including obtaining applied and practical “research” experience in the field. The Clinic, and evaluation experience in general, provides us with an opportunity to connect our methodological and content expertise as trained academic scholars to serve and meet the evaluation needs of local schools and community organizations. Beyond solely publishing on or about organizations, we partner with them to provide real-time and annual feedback and technical assistance to better understand, improve, or transform their programs.

While conducting evaluations in the Clinic, we have learned two major lessons:

Lesson Learned: Teamwork and collaboration is key.

You cannot do this work alone.  It is not only important to leverage the perspective and expertise of colleagues, but also imperative to work in partnership with stakeholders in the programs we are evaluating. These include working in partnerships with youth, parents, program staff, and community members. With their local knowledge and expertise, youth, parents, program staff, and community members offer distinct sources of expertise and knowledge that enhance evaluation design, implementation, and use.

Lesson Learned: Critical reflection is integral to evaluation.

It is important to constantly reflect on one’s identity (culture, race, class, gender, educational level, sexual orientation, and social status, etc) and the sociopolitical contexts in which we do our work. Aspects of society and our own background may shape the evaluation design and process, in both intended and unintended ways.  Critical Reflexivity, particularly regarding issues of race, racism and marginality, is important in helping evaluators understand the ways in which  sociopolitical contexts and their own identities shape how they interact with evaluation “participants”,  view and interpret data, as well as frame and report evaluation findings.

As scholar-evaluators, graduate student evaluators gain valuable skills and experience that are rarely offered in a traditional academic program. The Clinic provides comprehensive training that prepares students for immediate hands-on opportunities in the field to apply obtained academic knowledge through practical experiences. Exposure to evaluation gives students insight into potential non-tenure track career options. Moreover, graduate student evaluators build networks, connect with and learn from the community in meaningful ways, and can engage in a culturally responsive manner.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating The Wisconsin Idea in Action Week coordinated by the LEAD Center. The LEAD (Learning through Evaluation, Adaptation, and Dissemination) Center is housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison and advances the quality of teaching and learning by evaluating the effectiveness and impact of educational innovations, policies, and practices within higher education. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from student and adult evaluators living in and practicing evaluation from the state of WI. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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Warm wishes from wonderful Wisconsin! I’m Kimberly Kile, Project Manager for the LEAD Center, housed within WCER at the University of Wisconsin. The LEAD Center is comprised of professional staff who conduct program evaluation within and about higher education both locally and nationally. I had the opportunity to take a leading role in developing our center as a host site for an intern through the American Evaluation Association’s Graduate Education Diversity Internship (AEA GEDI) program. This post will share some hot tips and lessons learned in becoming a host site.

The host site information on the AEA GEDI website identifies the site’s responsibilities, as well as the roles of the intern’s mentor. Once we reviewed these materials and knew that we were able to meet these expectations, we moved forward with the application.

Concurrently, we identified a potential project for the intern to work on. It was important to us to have a project that could be started and completed within the internship timeline (Sept through June). We also wanted the intern to see the entire process of an evaluation project, from the planning stages through an end product.

Hot Tip:

Consider finding a partner or project to share the cost of hosting an intern. In our case, our center paid the GEDI’s salary and benefits, while the project paid for the GEDI’s professional development expenses. Be sure to work closely with your financial folks to work out all the payment details.

Hot Tip:

Because of the tight timeline, in our case, we included a note in the application that funding for the position was still pending. There is no financial obligation unless you select an intern.

Lesson Learned:

AEA reviews the applications and then forwards potential GEDI applicants to each host site. Because travel can be a significant financial burden to graduate students, we offered interviews both in-person and via Skype.

Lesson Learned:

The interview window is set by the GEDI program so the sites have little flexibility related to the interview schedule. We blocked a couple of half-days within the interview window to be sure all interviewers could participate. This occurs in summer and vacations can conflict with interviews. If you partner with someone to share the cost (like we did), be sure to invite the partner to participate in the interviews. We also blocked an hour or so of time after all the interviews, so that all interviewers could discuss the applicants and everyone could make a decision together.

The LEAD Center had a delightful experience as an AEA GEDI host site. The GEDI at our site brought fresh ideas to our staff. We would highly recommend others consider hosting an AEA GEDI!

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating The Wisconsin Idea in Action Week coordinated by the LEAD Center. The LEAD (Learning through Evaluation, Adaptation, and Dissemination) Center is housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison and advances the quality of teaching and learning by evaluating the effectiveness and impact of educational innovations, policies, and practices within higher education. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from student and adult evaluators living in and practicing evaluation from the state of WI. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

GEDI

I am Dawn X. Henderson, a past fellow of AEA’s Graduate Education Diversity Initiative (GEDI) and member of the Ann E. Casey’s Expanding the Bench Initiative. I recently developed an undergraduate seminar course in Community Psychology at a Minority Serving Institution. Program evaluation is a competency in Community Psychology and modeling evaluation was critical in passing my evaluation “wisdom” on to a group of “underrepresented” students through a partnership with a nonprofit. I aim to share some hot tips and lessons learned with those interested in teaching and working in evaluation.

Hot Tips:

• Practice logic models. In preparation of the evaluation report, the class met with the Executive Director to obtain information about the nonprofit, focusing on their programming and key activities. The process of building logic models allowed students to become familiar with services provided by the nonprofit and develop visual connections between inputs, activities, etc.

• Recognize the individual strengths and knowledge of your students/team. Students worked in pairs to perform the quantitative and qualitative analysis; each pair had a student familiar with the methodology and a weaker student. Weaker students learned new knowledge about data analysis and students collaboratively compiled findings into text and graphs.

• Divide the report in sections and assign main duties and responsibilities. Each section of the evaluation report had a student leader responsible for collecting information, majority of writing, and maintaining communication with students and faculty. Each student also had to review and summarize an article related to the nonprofit’s programs and services; summaries were integrated into the discussion or recommendation section of the report.

Lessons Learned:

• Maintain lines of communication on progress with the nonprofit. Maintaining contact with the nonprofit about status, challenges, and their needs can be useful in building feedback and recommendations to improve content. Using this process allows undergraduate students to understand the important role of integrating the nonprofit throughout the process in order to ensure the evaluation report is an accurate representation of their program.

• Develop timelines for important milestones/benchmarks. The majority of the evaluation report was completed at the end of the academic semester, making it a stressful process for students and myself. Building in benchmarks for each section of the evaluation report would have provided more opportunities for feedback and editing. I literally had to go through the entire report the night before its draft was due to the nonprofit.

The students approached the preparation of the evaluation report with limited knowledge in evaluation but some familiarity in traditional research in psychology. In the end, students discovered ways to translate research processes into evaluation and the nonprofit received useful information to support their programming and funding efforts.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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Hello everyone! We are Indira Phukan and Rachel Tripathy, graduate students at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. This past summer, we worked with a local environmental education organization to pilot several tools for evaluating learning outcomes related to stewardship and environmental behavior change. When it comes to understanding students’ perceptions of and relationships with nature, traditional assessment strategies often fall short, so we looked to creative, alternative evaluation techniques to understand student learning. We also conducted interviews and observations to understand how these tools might inform our research. One of the tools we explored this summer was an art-based embedded assessment.

In our pilot, five- to seven-year-old students participating in a weeklong camp at a coastal California campus were asked to make drawings before and after a scheduled activity where learning took place. The drawing prompts provided by their educators were broad enough to allow for the students to make choices about what they drew, but were also designed to direct student thinking toward the target activity. We collected student art and analyzed it with a rubric that considered thematic, analytic, informational, and contextual details. It was incredible to see the kinds of observations being made by six-year-olds! Their drawings definitely captured learning details that a written assessment would not, and the children had fun in the process. Moving forward, we are excited to see how this tool works with other age groups, and how it might be adopted as an embedded assessment strategy by other organizations.

Hot Tip: Site observations and interviews with educators can help researchers and practitioners design embedded assessments that fit seamlessly into existing curriculum and programming. The educators will thank you, and your data will reflect a more representative student experience.

Lesson Learned 1: When analyzing subjective student work, like art, the type of rubric being used is exceedingly important. The rubric should be well thought-out, and designed to tease out information that will answer your research questions. Ultimately, an effective rubric will go through various iterations during the pilot phase before a final version is decided upon.

Lesson Learned 2: Informative student art takes time. Initially, we wanted to give students about 5-10 minutes to produce a drawing, but we quickly learned that they needed at least 15 minutes to create something that we could properly analyze for insights about their learning.

Rad Resource 1: Rubric Library is a great online resource for browsing rubrics that others have used, and for finding inspiration for creating your own.

Rad Resource 2: Ami Flowers and her colleagues wrote a great article on using art elicitation for assessment. We drew a lot of inspiration from their findings.

AEA is celebrating GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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Hello fellow evaluation lovers! My name is Elizabeth Grim and I work as an evaluation consultant with The Consultation Center at Yale, where I primarily consult with community-based agencies to build evaluation capacity. Prior to joining The Consultation Center, I worked as a policy analyst for Connecticut’s statewide campaign to end homelessness.

With the growing popularity of social media, evaluators increasingly discuss data visualization and how to communicate evaluation findings to stakeholders. Yet we don’t always talk about how to effectively communicate within our own teams, which is just as important to the success of a project. Effective communication involves fostering workplaces and teams in which people are heard, understood, and acknowledged for their unique contributions.

Lesson 1: Encourage curiosity: Communication is easier when questions and comments come from a place of curiosity rather than judgment. Ask questions when discussing a project or deliverable rather than jumping immediately to feedback and conclusions.

Lesson 2: Know your colleagues: The first step in fostering better communication is developing a relationship with members of the team. How do your colleagues prefer to communicate? What are their unique skills and professional goals? What are they passionate about inside and outside of the office?

Lesson 3: Table technology: Technology provides us with more flexibility in the workplace and allows us to communicate with partners across the globe. However, technology also allows people to talk around issues, reduces the ability to contextualize information through tone of voice or facial expressions, and encourages multitasking, all of which can result in a breakdown in communication. Ask team members to check their non-essential technology at the beginning of a meeting. Consider providing an incentive like a monthly gift card drawing for those that go low-tech.

Rad Resource 1: 4 Pillars of Integrity Video Series – Make impeccable agreements. Making impeccable agreements means that you only agree to what you are able and willing to complete and that you follow through with your agreements. On the flipside, this means that you also say no to those that you are unable and/or unwilling to complete. Teams are more effective and members have more trust in each other when each member takes 100% responsibility for themselves and their actions.

Rad Resource 2: The Great Genius Swap – Work environments and teams are more effective when people enjoy what they’re doing. Conduct a genius swap with your team. Gather the team together and ask each person to write down the one task they most love to do at their job and the one task they would like to stop doing. Find opportunities for team members to continue doing what they love and explore whether you can swap responsibilities around to minimize those they don’t enjoy.

AEA is celebrating GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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My name is Megan Olshavsky and I’ve been an evaluator of PreK-12 educational programs for about a year and half now. Before starting my work in a public school district, I was researching learning and memory processes in rats, earning my Ph.D. in Psychology – Behavioral Neuroscience. My experiments were very controlled: the rats exhibited the behavior or they did not, neurons were active or they were not, results were statistically significant or they were not.

Moving from that environment to the “real world” of a school district which employs and serves humans in all their messiness caused some growing pains. How was I supposed to decide whether an educational intervention lead to academic improvement without proper control and experimental conditions?! One of the first projects I’ve worked on is a developmental evaluation of a technology initiative. Developmental Evaluation made me feel ever more flakey –“Hey everyone! Let’s monitor things as they unfold. What are we looking for? Not sure, but we’ll know it when we see it.”

As I’ve transitioned from researcher to evaluator, three things have helped me feel more legit.

Lesson Learned 1: Trust yourself. You may not be an expert in the area you are evaluating, but you do have expertise looking at data with a critical eye, asking probing questions, and synthesizing information from a variety of sources.

Lesson Learned 2: Collaborate with a team who has diverse expertise. Our developmental evaluation team engaged teachers, instructional technology specialists, information systems staff, and evaluators. When everyone on that team can come to the same conclusion, I feel confident we’re making the right decision.

Lesson Learned 3: Embrace capacity building as part of your work. No one would recommend training-up stakeholders to do their own inferential statistics. You can, however, influence the people around you to be critical about their work. Framing is critical. “Evaluation” is a scary word, but “proving the project/program/intervention is effective” is a win for everyone. Building relationships and modeling that expertise we talked about in Lesson #1 leads to gradual institutional shift toward evaluative thinking.

Rad Resource: Notorious R.B.G: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Let RBG be your guide as you gather and synthesize the relevant information, discuss with your diverse team, and advocate for slow institutional change.”

AEA is celebrating GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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 Hello! My name is Alana Kinarsky, a PhD student in the Evaluation program at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a graduate student, I regularly read evaluation theory and conduct my own research on evaluation. However, I often wonder how research on evaluation does or should help practitioners in their daily work.

Cool Trick: To connect research and practice, I organized a pop-up journal club during my summer internship at Informing Change. The journal club gave staff an opportunity to read and discuss evaluation research. I circulated a few theory papers via email and the group elected to read “Evaluation and Organizational Learning: Past, Present, and Future” by Rosalie Torres and Hallie Preskill. The following week, about 10 of us got together over pizza for a facilitated yet casual conversation. Discussing theory can help evaluation practitioners meaningfully reflect on their practice

Lesson Learned 1: Theory offers practitioners a framework and context for their evaluation work. As our conversation of the paper unfolded, we zeroed in on a question that weighs heavily in both theory and practice: what is the role of the evaluator? As people around the table began talking through different roles, I noticed their ideas began to align with the Evaluation Theory Tree developed by Marv Alkin and Tina Christie. I sketched it on the board and walked through the different “branches” of evaluation theory.   The Theory Tree focused our conversation and grounded some of these theoretical elements–like the role of an evaluator–in a visual that was analogous to the roles the Informing Change practitioners recognized in their work.

Lesson Learned 2: These conversations are an opportunity for teambuilding. A conversation about theory creates an opportunity for people from different backgrounds and leadership levels to participate in a shared dialogue. During our discussion, we shared personal stories, current challenges, and ideas for future team conversations rose to the surface. Furthermore, people who rarely work together had the opportunity to collaborate and brainstorm with peers.

Lesson Learned 3: Reflection on practice is important. Our work as evaluators is often fast paced so it is easy to get caught up in execution. However, it is important to make time to reflect on the big picture and think creatively. This not only improves an individual’s practice, but also supports organizational learning.

At the end of the hour, I asked the group to quickly share one takeaway from our conversation. The room was buzzing with energy as people shared what they learned and expressed enthusiasm for continuing this practice. The group agreed that stepping away from their desks to talk about theory offered them an opportunity to reflect, build relationships, and generate new ideas.

AEA is celebrating GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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