I’m Tiffany Tovey, lead evaluator in the Office of Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Services at UNC Greensboro. Much of my work involves partnering with educators, researchers, organizers, and community members in North Carolina and beyond to understand and strengthen their work.
When people think about dialogue in evaluation, they might picture interviews, focus groups, stakeholder meetings, or facilitated discussions. Those matter because they’re the places where the fruits of dialogue are often most visible. And yet dialogue is easy to overlook because we’re already immersed in it.
We’re always in dialogue. Dialogue unfolds in the conversations before the meeting starts, the trust built over months of partnership, the questions we choose to ask, the assumptions we carry into an interview, the silence after someone shares a difficult experience, and the stories people tell after we’ve left the room.
Dialogue is where observation, interpretation, judgment, and action continuously take shape. Every encounter carries histories, contexts, assumptions, and possibilities that shape what’s available to know.
This ongoing realization has changed what I pay attention to. Rigorous methods and credible evidence are born through disciplined interaction with the world. Evaluation reminds me that inquiry is never detached from the relationships and contexts through which it unfolds.
Increasingly, my attention has shifted toward the quality of encounter.
As an evaluator, I find myself asking different questions. Am I creating conditions where people can genuinely think together? What assumptions are shaping what becomes visible? How is my own framing influencing what participants feel able to share? How might that influence the validity of the judgments we eventually make?
Some colleagues and I have been calling this practice Reflective Dialogue. It’s our attempt to name, explore, and intentionally cultivate our capacity to think together in complexity.
As we prepare to gather in Charlotte this November, let’s notice the dialogue we’re already in.
Notice what changes in our practice when we pay attention not just to the evidence we’re collecting or discussing, but to the relationships through which that evidence becomes meaningful… in our projects, with our partners and clients, and among our colleagues. Those relationships are inseparable from the validity, usefulness, and eventual impact of our work.
If evaluation is about developing better judgments in service of better decisions, then learning to participate more intentionally in dialogue deserves the same deliberate attention we give our methods.
I look forward to being in dialogue with you in November, and to what we will shape together there.
Rad Resources
- Judgment, Flourishing, and the Composting of Evaluation through Reflective Dialogue: Curious about the ideas behind Reflective Dialogue? This open-access article explores how dialogue can strengthen evaluative judgment, learning, and collective sensemaking in complex settings.
- The Reflective Dialogue Collective website, where we will continue to build resources and community around the work.
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