Hi, we are Cathy Hearn, Vicki Bigelow, and Nate Phipps of the University of Michigan Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER). Here we share our model for creating a supportive, authentic learning environment for new and emerging evaluators. A version of this blog post was first presented at the 2022 American Evaluation Association conference.
Creating supportive and authentic professional learning experiences can produce significant mutual benefits for university-based evaluation centers and graduate students. For students, these experiences provide opportunities to develop professional and methodological skills in an authentic setting, engage in career-relevant paid student employment, and access career or academic mentorship. For university-based centers, providing these learning experiences helps our team access skilled hourly support on evaluation projects and retain a core of longer-term hourly employees who are familiar with our processes and norms.
Through our student support programming, we aim to help students to:
- Achieve professional goals
- Develop technical skills
- Access mentorship
- Build community
- Understand work assignments
The core of CEDER’s evaluation teaching model is a two-semester internship program, offered in partnership with the School of Education’s Program Evaluation and Improvement Research and Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education Master’s programs. Around this core program, we offer a constellation of other opportunities to support student learning and success.
Goal Setting Workbook: This workbook is designed to structure goal setting for student interns. At the beginning of their internships, students map out their goals; at set points throughout, they check in with their supervisors to revisit and refine them.
Internship Seminar: We offer a two-semester seminar for interns. Each session includes a workshop on a different evaluation topic or skill hosted by a guest speaker. In the first semester, we focus on building foundational evaluation skills, in the second, students are invited to suggest topics they would like to learn more about.
CEDER & Project Onboarding: Although onboarding activities can be time-intensive to prepare and deliver, they save time and mitigate risk further down the line. The CEDER team has developed a standard center onboarding session and templated project onboarding document that each student receives at the beginning of their internship.
Check-in Protocol: We encourage supervisors and interns to run through a learning-focused check-in protocol every week or two in order to ensure that they focus on interns’ professional development and areas for growth.
Peer Mentorship: We invite former student interns who are still employed at CEDER to mentor our current intern cohort. Our peer mentors offer one-to-one meetings with interns at critical points in the semester to support goal-setting, address challenges, and help connect students with resources.
Professional Learning Community: We invite all CEDER evaluation staff to host and participate in monthly Professional Learning Community sessions. During these sessions, team members (including interns) have the option of presenting an approach or tool that they have used, inviting feedback on a work-in-progress or challenge, or hosting a book club-style session where participants engage with an article, podcast, video, or other media.
Team Building: Throughout the year, we make efforts to plan inclusive team building activities to ensure that all our temporary and permanent team members develop a sense of belonging to our center.
This table cross references our student support aims with our activities and tools.
Hot Tip
In order to build a supportive professional learning environment for students, consider the staff capacity you would need and processes that you would need to put in place. At CEDER, we have built annual processes into our project management software, and a member of our permanent evaluation staff is responsible for overseeing our student support programming as a small portion of their overall effort. We also conduct a light-weight annual evaluation of our internship program to measure outcomes and inform incremental improvements.
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