Project Evaluation - from a latecomer
Karen S. Hollweg (khollweg@aed.aed.org <khollweg@aed.aed.org>)
Fri, 24 Nov 1995 18:24:40 -0500 (EST)
I'm Karen Hollweg -- one of those silent onlookers who's been swamped
with all the messages. I've taken piles of print outs with me to read
while on jury duty, on planes, etc. I haven't read the conversation of
the last couple weeks yet, but have a chance to respond today, and want
to make a few comments about the old evaluation topic.
In our 2 1/2 yr. TE/leadership project, we're trying to get teams of
elem. teachers, univ faculty, school dist curric/administrators, and
coordinators of informal educ. projects that take programs into schools
to work together to follow-through on the informal hands-on experiences
in a constructivist way. We want to find out what works for the teams,
kids and teachers -- and are using a variety of formative eval techniques
that have been mentioned: comment cards during summer institutes,
journals, etc. Through the teams we are working to cultivate reflective
practice and build support. The teams in each of 3 cities meet about 5
times throughout the school year.
We want to find out if what we're doing is changing classroom practice of
the participating teachers -- and since we're "into" experiments we
formulated some questions WITH our outside evaluators. They , as the
evaluation experts, designed techniques for and are collecting the data
-- via teacher logs, interviews, and review of documents submitted by the
teams (meeting minutes, journals, portfolios, etc) So far, their input
and insights have fed back into the project and have been helpful. I
firmly believe as some of you have said that it's important to work with
the outside evaluators so they understand the project and can be a useful
input at the same time that they are "objective outsiders". Our eval
budget is also about 10% of the total grant budget--money that I think is
well spent , because at the end, we'll know whether we have been able to
change what happens in classrooms
In addition to what we're learning through this outside evaluation, we're
all learning alot throughout the year from our reflective
self-evaluation. And the teachers (especially the team inKY) is learning
alot about what their kids are getting out of their experiences through
their authentic, imbedded assessments. As someone mentioned recently,
they're assessing different things than the standardized tests -- in
fact, I've been in team meetings with 2 of our teams when there has been
major wailing and gnashing of teeth over standardized tests.
I'm eager to go back and read what all of you have been saying about
standardized tests. And I'd very much like to learn about other 3rd
party techniques or more "objective" techniques you've used to try to
document what is happening inyour teachers' classrooms.
Karen Hollweg
North American Assn for Environmental Education
khollweg@aed.org <khollweg@aed.org>