PP Presentation

Program Evaluation: Making

Recommendations based on Program

Evaluations

Presented by Dr. Deb Gilbert, Capella University

Deb Gilbert

Kathie, we are back again and this time I would like to talk to you about any kind of tips you can give our learners,

regarding, using the information from the program evaluation to improve student achievement, whether it would be

in their classrooms or whole school, or department. Is there anything you can tell them to look for or to aid them in

doing this?

Kathie Greer

I think one of the key things that I could say about that, when you say that it brings to mind. A quote, I heard

recently that I really have kind of attached my brain to, and it says, "If you want to grow, you must love truth more

than your own opinion, and what that means for me from an evaluation stand point is that part of what you need to

do when you are looking at programs. Looking at what you are doing as a practice is that you can not allow yourself

to be so attached to what your own perception is, of what should work and what you enjoy doing in terms of

intervention and programs

Sometimes, we have our own little favorite things that we want to do or things that we believe in and just as, I said

earlier, that we had to make a change in terms of what we are doing with the test prep. I believed of course in that

taking the extra 20 minutes, because it worked extremely well for me in another school setting, and actually it had

been replicated by some other schools, and it worked very well for them. So, I believed much it would work here,

but I had to obviously let go of my belief and my perception that-that was the intervention to be used here, and look

at some other solutions in that regard, because obviously for this particular setting. It was not the best thing.

So the first thing that you have to do, is to be open and approach the situation in an open fashion, and not be tied to

any particular train of thought when you are doing that. So you have to first be open to other possibilities, and not

try to hold on to things that obviously are not being effective, based on your own personal feelings or view of that

particular thing.

Do not be afraid to fine tune things also, do not be afraid to just totally scratch something and go back to the

drawing board, because, believe me in a long run, you will save yourself a whole lot of grief to just sometimes to

start over. I like to say "back up and punt, but to sometimes you just need to start over, and just recreate something

or create something totally different from what you have done before, and I had to say, just do not fear that, and a lot

of time we do. Sometimes we do so because we are afraid that other people might think, "Oh well, they do not know

what they are doing" because you know, it just does not work.

I think that it is much more of something that people can respect in you if you are willing to say "looked, I recognize

that these is not working, and yeah, it was my idea but it is not working, so, we need to do something else", and you

will be much more productive by doing that.

The other thing that I would mention is that sometimes you may have to find your own funding sources and

certainly at the school that we worked at first together, we did know that because we did not have an endless supply

of resources. Some of the time, we have great ideas that were not going to be funded by any district initiative or

anything or state, and so, sometimes we have to go out and find our own funding. The after school grant was a

perfect example of that. It was an idea and something that I felt was needed and would work but there was nobody in

the district who was willing to fund that, so we had to find our own funding for that.

Some examples, I guess other examples would be like doing special scheduling. From one of the things that we do

now is try to tell our master schedule to meet the specific needs of certain students in our population. Doing bridge

programs and bringing students in at some different levels from what they normally would be expected to come in as

a ninth grader to try and meet the students where they are, so, those kinds of things. You have to be creative. You

have to understand that sometimes, you may have to find your own resources to do things and you have to really

come to it with an open mind.

Credits

Expert Speaker:

Kathie Greer

Interactive Design:

Marc Ashmore

Instructional Design:

Megan Eskola

Project Management:

Jay Her Neish Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.