Summary

Social innovators often find themselves dealing with problems, trying out strategies, and striving to achieve goals that emerge from their engagement with the change process. Developmental evaluation (DE) informs and supports innovative and adaptive development in complex dynamic environments. DE empowers those who are working together toward common goals to embed evaluative thinking in the work they do, and share their learning as they go to inform their next steps. DE brings to innovation and adaptation the processes that involve participants in asking evaluative questions, applying evaluation logic, and gathering and reporting evaluative data to support project, program, product, and/or organizational development with timely feedback. (Patton, McKegg, & Wehipeihana, 2016) Evaluation practitioners will learn how to utilize Developmental Evaluation as an evaluation practice as change agents for the evaluand — the social innovation that will take us to where we want to get to; and how to embed DE practices in program/ policy development and implementation teams will be shared.

Learning Objectives:

• have a practical understanding of DE, its application & uses and know how developmental evaluators track, document, and help interpret the nature and implications of innovations and adaptations as they unfold
• help extract lessons and insights from both processes and outcomes to inform the ongoing adaptive innovative process in complex dynamic environments
• use theory of change/action logic model and articulate the plausibility/feasibility of the desired change of the evaluand to bring focus and guide DE

Facilitators

Keiko Kuji-Shikatani | Dr. Wendy Rowe | Megan Börner

Keiko is an internationally known evaluator with expertise in DE and sharing her evaluation practice and research focusing on evaluative thinking, evaluation use, evaluation capacity building and embedding monitoring and evaluation systems in organization for the broader community for over 25 years in Canada and internationally. She shared how she utilizes DE as an internal evaluator (Kuji-Shikatani, Gallagher, Franz, & Börner, 2016) in the DE Case Exemplars (Patton, McKegg & Wehipeihana, 2016).

Schedule | Saturday, May 26 from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm

Language | English

Level | Intermediate

Prerequisites | This workshop is at the intermediate level and requires at minimum an intermediate understanding of evaluation terms and methodology. Completion of all modules of the CES Essential Skills Series, which is regularly offered by CES chapters, and/ or equivalent foundational evaluation training/experience is a pre-requisite and highly recommended to ensure maximum benefit of the course.