Making the most of the AEA Ethical Guiding Principles in your evaluation practice by Leslie Goodyear

Hi everyone! I’m Leslie Goodyear, chair of the AEA Guiding Principles Working Group (GPWG). In my day job, I’m Principal Evaluation Director at Education Development Center (EDC), a global nonprofit that advances lasting solutions to improve education, promote health, and expand economic opportunity. I’ve been active in AEA for 25 years, serving on multiple task forces and working groups related to evaluation ethics and the Guiding Principles. And I’ve also been an AEA Board member and AEA President. In addition to chairing the GPWG, I served on the task force that revised the Guiding Principles that were ratified by the membership in 2018. The GPWG is tasked with finding creative ways to build awareness of the AEA Evaluators’ Ethical Guiding Principles among AEA members. This is part of a series of aea365 blog posts developed by the GPWG to raise awareness, share resources, and encourage reflective practice.

The GPWG is busy finding ways to raise awareness and encouraging use of the Ethical Guiding Principles. In addition to this aea365 Blog series (look for more posts in coming months), we’re updating the existing training materials on the AEA website so that they better reflect the 2018 revisions, we’ll be hosting sessions at the AEA annual conference, and we have proposed to facilitate a pre-conference workshop for those interested in diving deeper into how to use the Principles to foster ethical evaluation practice.

And – drum roll, please – our working group is hosting an AEA Virtual Town Hall in May! The purpose of this virtual meeting is to ensure that members are aware of the Ethical Guiding Principles, and share some examples of how these Principles can be used in practice. We’ll share examples of how these Principles can be applied in all stages of an evaluation, from contracting and planning, to implementing and reporting. The Town Hall will feature members of our working group as well as members of the task force that worked on the 2018 revisions. Join us!!

Rad Resource: AEA Town Hall: Using the Revised AEA Guiding Principles in Your Practice

The Guiding Principles, which support our ethical decision making as evaluators, were revised and approved by the membership in 2018. A previous Town Hall meeting highlighted the differences. The Guiding Principles Working Group is tasked with assisting members to use these Principles in their practice. Toward that end, submissions for the AEA conference will need to reference the Guiding Principles. This town hall will review the major changes to the Guiding Principles made in 2018 and engage town hall participants in discussing ways the Principles can be incorporated in the evaluation practice from planning an evaluation, carrying it out, and supporting the use of its findings.

Date: Friday May 8, 2020: 2:00 PM ET.  Register here.

Another Rad Resource: Further down on the same webpage referenced above, you can find all of the current and past Town Halls. If you want to know more about what changes were made to the Guiding Principles and why, check out the recording of the June 2018 Town Hall.

This post is part of an occasional series on the AEA Guiding Principles. Each post in the series was contributed by a member of the AEA Guiding Principles Working Group. 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.