All finished… for Fall 2008. Still a half marathon to go.

There is always something “magical” about the last… thing, whatever it is. For this last blog, I am a little bit sentimental about all that has been put into this blog, and this class, over the last three months. I can remember starting in August, when it was hot, and hearing about weekly blog posts, evaluation projects, time lines, evaluation plans, and I could not even imagine what that would look like, or add up to. And now, it’s December 7th, and it’s basically done. I just dropped my final, final paper and now I am feeling like I’m done. Like I said, there is an element of sentimentality to finalizing any period of time.

Over this semester, from hot August days reading on back porch a text about the most imperitive steps of an evaluation, to cold November Saturdays sitting in front of my computer in my new office room in my new apartment as snow falls just feet from me through the window as I write my own evaluation, I began to see what a tangible thing evaluations are. I think I always took for granted evaluations, I looked at them like they were small discussions that people had, but that real change was organic and just happened over time. I guess I didn’t want to admit that real change, qualitative and needed change is not always organic but something that happens only when someone, or a team, steps up and makes a calculated effort to discover what needs to be changed.

I learned the importance of planning an evaluation. Of determining what, exactly needs to be evaluated, what might come of the evaluation, and what will happen once that information is accumulated. Evaluations happen because change is necessary, and like I said, it can’t always be an organic change, like evolution. Sometimes to evolve means to take a hard look at what is being done and determine what needs to keep going, what needs to stop, and what needs to start. I never realized that an evaluation of a program is so imperative on planning, and then so important to the full functioning of the system the program resides in.

I also learned about Appreciative Inquiry. The concept that positive thinking can bring about change, when those positive thoughts are garnered in an appropriate manner. I was impressed by the notion of change coming from people focusing on what is working, rather than complaining about what isn’t. I know in the system I work in, we spend copious amounts of time bitching about the bad, the way we are being stiffled, the things the administration is making us do, the incompetencies of those around us, and the quality of life we put up with when, if we just took a moment to really relish what we have, as teachers in a great school, in a great curriculum that teaches English in a modern and adaptive way, we would see that there might not be that much to complain about. More than that, using Appreciative Inquiry to compose change is an amazing concept in that it insists on focusing on what works and relies on participators to then channel that good into more productive and positive benefits for the particular program being evaluated. That’s the kind of evaluation I want to be part of.

Evaluation is key to change. I certainly will admit that change does happen organically, but even then, some element has been evaluated and deemed necessary for change. Evaluations on a larger scale, like the hypothetical one we conducted for ESPY474 in the CTER Program at U of I is necessary for the good of the system. I would like to think that I would be able to conduct an evaluation on that kind of scale, and more than just knowing that I accomplished a relatively large task, I would know that I contributed to making a system even better, for everyone involved.

Thank you for an amazing learning experience. This is honestly something I knew very little about, something that was not even a part of my general interests when it comes to education, and I can say with some clarity and confidence now that I feel like I could be a good evaluator. I wonder if part of that comes from being surrounded by peers who were more than amazing at their task. I might need to draw on them again in the future if I ever find myself writing an evaluation.
Take care!

 

Observations but not a lot going on up there…

I feel like I’m not being the best classmate I can be, because as I read my fellow classmates’ evaluations, my critiques lack any kind of real substantative thought. I want to be able to really generate thoughful responses, criticisms too, but I feel that I’m having a hard time thinking about what could be lacking. This could be because of the hypothetical nature, or the fact that I’m not really responsible for questioning the validity of the evaluation but rather the dynamics of the write-up, does it work together, are the questions answere, etc. Truthfully, this is probably just the small part of my personality, the Type A part, that wants to tell and direct rather than observe and congradulate.

After getting feedback on my own evaluation, I am excited to spend the next two weeks finalizing it, polishing it, and putting together the PowerPoint that will eventually accompany it. I”m not sure how that is going to look or what specific factors of my evaluation will be highlighted, but as I read through my evaluation a fourth and fifth time I start to conjure up the stuff that really stands out and the stuff that is repetative. I keep trying to compare it to the type of evaluations in the Preskill text, the case studies, but again, that requires me to look at it analytically and then my brain does this weird shift where I start to pick it apart and find flaws in the logic. With a hypothetical case, I wonder if that’s just inevitable?
So, long story short. I feel like I have senioritis as Thanksgiving Break slowly approaches, but I know what I am going to do to keep busy. I’ve also counted my chickens before they hatced and looked ahead to the next two months and realized that we have a break from school for a month and half between the end of the two classes I’m taking right now and the start of the Spring semester. That is very exciting, especially in terms of a winter break from work as well. Ah… the holidays are upon us.

Take care. Watch 24 if you recorded it.

Have a great Thanksgiving break!

Brendan

 

Conor Oberst, Travis, Parent Conferences, and a Big Paper

If you have a free moment, check out Conor Oberst’s new self-titled album along with Travis’ new album, “Ode to J. Smith.” They have been the guiding inspiration as I confer with 70 some odd parents over the course of a week and as I have dilegently, though sluggishly, attempted to piece together this evaluation.

If the last couple of weeks have been anything, they have been inconsistent. From moving, to less work in one class, to hosting a discussion in another… the normalcy of work, life, and CTER have sort of been replaced by singular events, quasi-deadlines, and finding places to put all my tupperware. However, what I have noticed is that the pedagogy I have been developing, or that has been welling up inside of me, since the start of this program has started to infiltrate my everyday life.

For instance, last Saturday I went to the Congress Theater to see Girl Talk. If you are unfamiliar with Girl Talk, he is a young man who samples and mashes a lot of popular songs together, creating new 3 and 4 minute versions of various songs, together. These songs are fantastic to dance or work out to because you recognize both layer. For instance, he might have a Rod Stewart hook over a current rap song. But why does this remind me of CTER? Because, over the summer in 457 we spoke, though briefly, about copyright and infringement and how the internet sort of juxtaposes the very notion of copyright, at least how it is currently protected. Anyways, I respect what this artist is doing, and I enjoy the product, but I get it, like I appreciate it on another level, because of CTER and the idea that we all have a desire to take and recreate, to remix and then be heard.

So, on to more pressing matters. I’ve spent the better part of the last two afternoons working inside my little office room at the back of my apartment with a slanted floor trying to compose my final evaluation paper. While I keep my right foot stationary to stay locked in front of my computer, my screen flashes from Patrick O’Hara’s pdf document of his final essay to my work in progress, back to my Pre and Post Interview Questions, quickly stopping at Pat’s final piece and then back to mine to integrate everything I just took in. This has been a cumbersome and sluggish process and I wish I was done, however, I have learned a great deal since Saturday morning at 11, and I wasn’t able to articulate why my evaluation or the program the evaluation was covering was effective until I went through this lengthy process.

So, I am still working on it as we speak. I am on page 14 without any appendixes, I feel I may be writing too much though I can’t be sure I am being coherant. My hopes are that when I send this off to Kona in the next 24 hours it is returned with a note saying something of the following; “Brendan, great paper. You are right on. I think you could do this professionaly and I am very impressed by your writing. You have nothing left to do with this paper, just sit back and enjoy the pizza’s I’ve sent to your house as a jesture of kudos and well-wishes.”

While that would be pure delight, in truth I am excited to hear what I can revise because there are some serious questions I have had during this process (what tense do I write in?) and I am looking forward to the revision process.
About the PowerPoint? I have no idea. That is what next week is for. Or Thanksgiving.

Enjoy some new music,

Brendan

 

Next week will be HUGE!

This week my studies took a back seat as illness and moving proved to be too powerful a force to contend with. I’ve been in my new place in Chicago for just over a week and I finally feel settled. And with that settling in feeling that settled in yesterday as the last box was kicked to the curb, so did a feeling of wellness that I hadn’t felt in over a week. So, I am moved in and healthy. And that means I can finally really give myself to one of my other priorities these days, the CTER program. You know what they say, you can’t have two gods, and lately I’ve been praying at the alter of unpacking and cough medicine.

So this next week I plan on making some discernable and qualitive progress regarding my final project. Looking at those examples, I was finally able to understand what this progress will appear like on paper. After reviewing the various assignments we have turned in over the course of the last two months that regard our hypothetical evaluationI feel like I have a good start, though I want to add more. The first example, for instance, really has some great documents regarding permission to conduct the analysis and the proposal in general. I feel like my introduction section could be sectioned off in to parts, like Example 1 showed. I would also like to spend this week conducting some hypothetical surveys at school regarding the use of wiki’s in the classroom. I’m excited to see, first hand, the kind of responses generated when AI is used.

I hope that I don’t get too overwhelmed with the final project and keeping my head on straight. This month is sure to get a little crazy, especially with Parent/Teacher Conferences, the quarter ending on Wednesday, and trying to keep up with my other CTER class, ESPY556. Speaking of 556, I am enjoying taking the two classes simultaneously, and I have been able to link the two classes I’m taking this semester together. For example, I had a project due on Saturday for 556 that asked my to create an Instructional Video so, using my interest in wiki sites generated from my evaluation in this class, I created a three minute iMovie on how to create a wiki for educational purposes in the classroom. But I bring that class up because I would like to add a component from that class to this class, 474. In 556, every Tuesday, we meet online, in Elluminate or Adobe Connect. I would really benefit, especially right now with the semester winding down and the project looming over me, from an online meeting like that in this class. Just a suggestion. Even with a small group, just to discuss the project and our ideas of how to use PowerPoint to accurately and effectively depict our evaluation.

I realize this blog was all over the place, but that’s how my life has felt this week. I was looking over my work from this summer and I am taken back by how focused my mind was, despite being in two classes. Teaching really does mess with your mind, and I see how much I dedicate myself to the job when I see how scrambled my efforts appear during these 9 months compared to those two in a half I have off over the summer. I say this in jest, but I can’t wait for the summer to get here. Maybe that is not said in jest.
Anyways, this next week promises some serious progress, some determined focus, and a whole lot of grading. It’s going to be huge!

Oh, and on Tuesday night look for me at Grant Park. I will be at the Obama Rally. I got my email confirmation today, so that coupled with a very tired Wednesday makes me feel like Monday and Thursday will be work nights for me and this class.

Take care!

 

Week 9 Posting

Well, this week has been crazy for me. This weekend I moved to the city, and I lost track of my priorities, meaning I forgot to to post to this blog. But there was a lot to reflect on, and a lot to discuss regarding this class and all things evaluation.

For starters, as the Preskill text culminates I find myself with an appreciation for evaluation that I could not have predicted. For starters, just the sheer magic involved in what Appreciative Inquiry can achieve astounds me. While I know those are big claims, it’s true. Using Appreciative Inquiry, as I’ve noted countless times already, simply allows the evaluation to focus on the positives in the organization, the very reason why an evaluation should take place, to keep the organization or program succedding. The draw, obviously, is that people like to focus on what has been done that can be considered good. This powerful strategy helps the evaluation move forward towards the good, rather than spending hours evaluating what went wrong.

As I’ve been building my evaluation from the ground up, and as I’ve been enjoying the parallels in the Preskill text Case Studies to my own evaluation, I’ve started to note how powerful the initial questions are. I worry that I may have rushed through these questions in my own evaluation, because it seems my questions would not provoke the kind of positive thinking that the case studies exhibit. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic and the AI positive light has yet to infiltrate my own mind, but I just want these questions to be right on the money. With my project, I may even enlist the help of some friends in the field to judge the effectiveness of those questions. I will have to go back and rewrite those questions to better suit an Appreciaitve Inquiry point of view, but I would also like to make sure my essay reflects the difference I noted in my first and revised questions. While I still do not know what my paper will come out to be, I am anticipating enjoying the process of a final, all-encompassing reflection.

 

Survey Evaluation Reflection

Having this week to develop surveys that implemented the ideas of Appreciative Inquiry really opened my eyes to the importance of proper questioning and how having a goal in mind of what the survey should reflect / solve is the most important step to finding those right words that truly make a survey worthwhile.

This appreciation came after dialogueing with my partner in crime, Hannah, about the survey I concocted and where I went wrong. Specifically, I was too vague in my approach, too loose-goosey, and because of that, the objective of the survey, though pronounced in my introduction, was not clear. After talking to her on the phone and then emailing back and forth, it was clear that I needed to change the wording of a couple of questions in order to make the survey more approachable and to garner the kind of results I desired. One of my big revelations this week, aside from the importance of questions in general, was how important it was not step away and not make the survey about me or about my job as an evalutor (or teacher) but rather about the person taking the survey and their experience during the course of what was being evaluated. Because I am so engrained in this project, it was hard for me to ask questions that didn’t center around my performance as a teacher or as an evaluator. Talking to Hannah and hearing her concerns about certain questions lead me to see that there were some questions that were centered too much around the teaching and not enough about the experience of the student.

For example, one of my “draft” questions was, “Now that you have seen how a wiki can be used in the classroom, what three wishes do you have to use a wiki in school?” That is such a “teacher-centered” question that a student taking the survey would not feel compelled or interested to answer. Instead, I changed the question to reflect the learner, the student, and how wiki’s were used in their classroom and what positive experiences came with it. In this came, the result will be more focused on what students are enjoying in regards to wiki-use, and solving this problem helped me not only articulate the focus of said particular question but also of the survey as a whole.

 

Appreciative Inquiry Interview Questions

While I try to be clever with names and such I am out of luck for the last few weeks when it comes to Appreciative Inquiry. Or maybe it is just the weekend I have had. This week has been quite stressful, with house-hunting in the city, subleasing my place, curriculum planning after school, and finally today going to the Chicago Marathon to cheer on a friend. While it was a great week, and a fantastic day that was inspiring, I’m physically and mentally drained as I’m sure most of us educators are as October rears it’s busy head into our calendars and forces us to question the last month, look to the future, and examine papers like IRS agents in April.

That being said, fixing these questions to adhere to my evaluation plan was priority number one. The questions I came up with were derived from Chapter 3 and 4 of the Preskill Text. I emulated the questions from the case studies as well as the guiding focus through Chapter 4. What seems most important was the adherence to understand the interviewee’s point of view when hearing the questions, and while these questions are supposed to be open and free, it was important that they guided the interviewee towards a positive experience.

My partner really helped me out in this process. She read through my questions and gave me some great feedback regarding the way my questions fell in line with Appreciative Inquiry. In particular, she told me that I could focus more on the interviewee’s experience with the program and the technology in the program rather than the way the technology might be used. In other words, she told me to ask, “what is a positive experience you have had with wiki’s” rather than “How can a wiki, like pbwiki or wikispaces, help student learning? In other words, why are wiki’s so effective for learning?”  I really appreciated this kind of feedback because, at second glance, these questions were a little too standard in their nature and didn’t lend themselves to being a AI in their format.

I think this process really clarified the difference between setting up an Appreciative Inquiry interview as opposed to a standard interview. These questions, when delivered before, as my intentions were, can give the evaluation a new, positive perspective and will provide the kinds of positive feedback that will help focus the evaluation from this point forward.

 

Questions, Questions, Questions…

Preparing my evaluation plan this week was eye-opening. It wasn’t until I wrote the questions that I started to really understand what the purpose of the evaluation was and what I wanted the outcome to be. Not that I didn’t have a vision for my evaluation prior to the beginning of the evaluation, but as I set up the questions I had for the participants, I began to have a breath of what the answers might be, and how pbwiki (the evaluation is on the usefulness and effectiveness of wiki’s in the classroom) would help the students. The questions are below:

• Are students meeting the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) as well as the English Language Arts Standards as described by the National Council of Teachers of English?
• Since implementing wiki’s in the classroom, has student growth in the key areas of Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening improved over time?
• How has teacher to student communication and feedback on assignments improved since the implementation of the wiki?
• How well are students using the wiki to bridge information in the classroom into an online context?

These questions open up the discussion (and possibly the answer) more than I anticipated. Those questions really focused what I was trying to determine with the evaluation, and what I started to understand was the evaluation would work most effectively if I had a clear vision for the outcome. With that somewhat obvious insight now clear, I tried to articulate questions that focused on all aspects of the program, getting feedback from teachers, students, and actual assessment. In particular, I wanted to focus on the assessments of the various teachers involved in the program becuase, as it stands, the teachers in that department all have common assessments so noticing any improvements over time, between various teachers, can be (but might not necessarily be) because of the implementation of the wiki program. Using the various questions as a means of evaluation assessment should provide adequate feedback for whether the wiki program is useful.

 

How does AI ever achieve anything?

Throughout the Preskill text highlighting all that makes up an Appreciative Inquiry Evaluation, I had a hard time taking off my standard evaluation hat and adopting this new, positive-thinking, type evaluation. But throughout this week, I finely understood how anything actually gets done with AI.

Let me back up. When I first read through The Program Evaluation Standards, I think I grasped, with relative ease, what goes into an evaluation. I saw how data was necessary, at all points, to ensure that something was being tested and that there were, indeed, results. Reading through Preskill’s text left me yearning for that need for data, and though I am a positive person in my own respect, I felt a twinge of doubt towards AI for never counting on hard evidence, data, numbers, to broadcast what was being done in an organization or program and ultimately what needed be done still. But this week, after noting the similarities between the two types of evaluations using the Competencies list on page 43 and 44 of Preskill’s text, I began to see how change can come, even without a quantitative evaluation.

Preskill  notes in Chapter 1 of the text the following:

“When people first learn about Appreciative Inquiry, they often question what happens to the problems. A common first reaction is that AI’s focus on success means that the problems, issues, or challenges are ignored or even denied. However, this is fundamentally incorrect. Appreciative Inquiry does in fact address issues, challenges, problems, and conflict, but it does so by shifting the focus and language from one of deficits to one of hope and possibilities based on what has worked in the past” (Preskill 26).

I read this quote two weeks ago. When I was reviewing my notes, with a new lens after looking at those competencies and trying to find similarities, a light went off and I started to realize how Appreciative Inquiry actually locates problems and solves them. It’s in between the highlights, the goods, the positives that are expressed, one can start to see where there is a lack of enthusiasm, and a good evaluator, while not focusing on the negative, can find ways to have the client express what is missing. I like the challenge, but above the challenge, I like the personal touch AI encourages from evaluators, pressing them to really listen, to continue exploring their client’s hopes and dreams, and to find what, exactly, makes an organization or program worth fighting for in the first place.

 

Appreciative Inquiry Week 2 Thoughts

As far as evaluations and evaluating goes, Appreciative Inquiry seems to take the cake, in my mind. As previously notes, it’s amazig to think almost solely on the half-full side of life, asking people to remember why they are good for a corporation and then utilizing that “good” to make the organization better. I really like that idea.

After reading over more articles regarding Appreciative Inquiry and reading over my peers annotated bibliographies I was literally delighted to see how Appreciative Inquiry works in the real world. In Preskill’s text regarding AI, it’s very clear that AI is a positive approach to evaluation, and the evaluations illustrate how asking about the good of people, the good of the organization (as opposed to the bad) makes for a better outcome in the end. However, seeing the annotated bibliographies of my peers, and reading over the three different AI-focus articles I used in my own annotated bibliography, I was, like I said, delighted, to see how Appreciative Inquiry really works. One of my peers spoke about how AI uses a constructivist approach, and that’s something I never conceptualized before. Using a constructivist model for evaluations, rather than simply telling what is bad and what needs to be done, must be more effective for those needing to make the change. They must first recognize the need for change, then the change is a more comfortable thing. This is how constructivism plays itself out in an Appreciative Inquiry Eval.

I guess what it comes down to is that AI is a great cause, and seeing it work not just in Preskill’s argument but instead in everyday organizations and schools makes me feel good. I have faith in AI, I like knowing that people will do good when they are listened to and that people will make good decisions if just given the opportunity to reflect on what they’re doing.