Evaluation And Facilitation

Join the conversation between evaluation and facilitation. This issue explores the interplay between the two and how one practice can inform the other. The authors represent both the evaluation and facilitation fields, describing underlying concepts that inform their practices, the competencies they seek to develop, the choices they make about facilitation in the work they do, and how they gauge success. This issue brings together topics meant to stimulate the curiosity of evaluators and facilitators and encourage reflection on their work and the skills needed to carry it out. This is the 149th issue in the New Directions for Evaluation series from Jossey-Bass. It is an official publication of the American Evaluation Association.

Michael Quinn Patton’s Facilitating Evaluation: Principles in Practice is the first book of its kind to explain in depth and detail how to facilitate evaluation processes with stakeholders. Using the author’s own stories of his experiences as an evaluation facilitator, the book illustrates the five evaluation facilitation principles that are the organizing framework for addressing how to work with stakeholders to generate evaluation questions, make decisions among methods, interpret findings, and participate in all aspects of evaluation. Ultimately, this book will help readers perform facilitation to enhance the relevance, credibility, meaningfulness, and utility of evaluations. "A must-read for anyone considering a high-impact evaluation!" –Margaret Lombe, Boston College

Join the conversation between evaluation and facilitation. This issue explores the interplay between the two and how one practice can inform the other. The authors represent both the evaluation and facilitation fields, describing underlying concepts that inform their practices, the competencies they seek to develop, the choices they make about facilitation in the work they do, and how they gauge success. This issue brings together topics meant to stimulate the curiosity of evaluators and facilitators and encourage reflection on their work and the skills needed to carry it out. This is the 149th issue in the New Directions for Evaluation series from Jossey-Bass. It is an official publication of the American Evaluation Association.

Facilitation is emerging as an exciting profession. It is being used in a wide range of situations and occupations, including workplaces, leisure and health activities, organizational planning and community development. This book provides a readable introduction for newcomers to the topic as well as a critical analysis of established and current theory for existing practitioners. It will be useful for managers, staff developers, innovators, and social and community workers.

Effective planning, monitoring and evaluation (PME) is essential for organisational survival and for sustainable development, but remains a challenge for many development organisations, in spite of countless workshops, manuals and intervention of experts. This book presents ‘real-life’ experiences of 20 PME trainers and facilitators from Africa, Asia and Europe and offers suggestions for effective PME support processes, with a focus on civil society organisations. The authors seek to embrace a ‘total organisation’ approach to PME, one that looks at an organisation in its entirety, including its financial dimension, its environment, its collaborators and competitors, in a context informed by local and national cultures.

You've taken your introduction to evaluation course and are about to do your first evaluation project. Where do you begin? Interactive Evaluation Practice: Managing the Interpersonal Dynamics of Program Evaluation helps bridge the gap between the theory of evaluation and its practice, giving students the specific skills they need to use in different evaluation settings. Jean A. King and Laurie Stevahn present readers with three organizing frameworks (derived from social interdependence theory from social psychology, evaluation use research, and the evaluation capacity building literature) for thinking about evaluation practice. These frameworks help readers track the various skills or strategies to use for distinctive evaluation situations. In addition, the authors provide explicit advice about how to solve specific evaluation problems. Numerous examples throughout the text bring interactive practice to life in a variety of settings.