AES 2015 International Evaluation Conference

Involving people using participatory approaches increases the likelihood of evaluation use.  Such approaches also enable a lot of rich data to be collected in a short amount of time. They allow participants to connect more deeply with the evaluand and with each other.  To use these approaches, evaluators need practical skills in facilitation and require confidence to use the tool that best suits the situation.

In this session, participants will experience and learn about some fun and engaging group processes. They will feel how being active and moving their bodies helps learning and allows new insights to emerge. This will be an opportunity to take a break from passively listening to didactic presentations.  Participants will also be challenged to think about how these processes can be used in their own evaluation work. 

We will facilitate three short group processes each with a different purpose:

1. Build understanding of people, strengths and contributions to the process, to create a shared understanding of who is in the room
2. Group analysis technique
3. Group decision making technique

 In doing this we will use ‘participation at AES 2015’ as our evaluand.

These techniques are about:

• Encouraging people to tap into their hearts and minds (feelings and emotions) when doing evaluative thinking, rather than only heads (thoughts)
• Embracing people‘s diversity, personalities, power and interests, enabling the group to achieve more as a whole rather just as individuals
• Building ownership of the analysis and findings to ensure utilization of evaluation finding