Ed Eval TIG Week: Krista Collins on Leadership and Member Opportunities in the PreK-12 Educational Evaluation TIG

Hello again!  I’m Krista Collins, chair of the PreK-12 Educational Evaluation TIG and Director of Evaluation at Boys & Girls Clubs of America. This week we’re sharing valuable research tips, evaluation results and exciting opportunities for evaluators working in the PreK-12 arena.

It’s been an exciting year for our TIG!  We’ve focused on ways to increase member engagement and have identified multiple ways – both one-time events and continuous opportunities – for members to get more familiar with our work.  We know that member engagement in TIGs and local affiliates is often challenging, so I hope these ideas are helpful to many groups.

Lesson Learned – Provide Concrete Tasks! Put together a list of roles and responsibilities, alongside expected timelines, and allow members to sign-up for a specific task.  They’ll be able to determine up front how they can feasibly contribute and the leadership team can be more relaxed throughout the year knowing that the important work will get done.

We identified four new ways for members to get involved outside of conference program review opportunities:

1. TIG Emails: We send out quarterly emails aligned with important AEA events.  Members can take the lead on preparing these newsletters, keeping it simple by building on the archived newsletters from previous years.
2. Social Media Team: We ask for members to commit to posting articles, resources, conversation starters, etc. related to PreK-12 Educational Evaluation on our social media platforms each month.
3. AEA 365: We ask 5 members to author an AEA 365 post on a topic of his/her choice to be published during the PreK-12 TIG sponsored week. One person will also take responsibility for coordinating our submission with the AEA 365 curator, assuring that all blog posts adhere to the guidelines.
4. AEA Liaison: Best suited for a member more familiar with the TIGs work, the liaison will represent the PreK-12 voice by participating in AEA calls, submitting feedback on behalf of PreK-12 TIG to inform AEA decisions as well as field requests from other TIGs or AEA members about collaborations.

Hot Tip: Don’t be Shy! Collaborating with other TIG’s is a great way to bring some new life into your group.  This year we were honored to co-host a shared business meeting with the Youth-Focused and STEM TIGs allowing our mutual membership to network and discuss their evaluation project with young people and youth professionals across a variety of learning environments.

Rad Resource: Stay current on all things Prek-12 TIG by checking out our website, Facebook, and Twitter pages.  As a member, you’ll receive emails throughout the year including resources and upcoming events to support your professional development, as well as a description of our program review criteria to support your conference proposal.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Ed Eval TIG Week with our colleagues in the PreK-12 Educational Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our Ed Eval 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.