“The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken.” (John Barton, Canadian poet)
Continuing Change: Evaluation & Improvement
To some, a possibly discouraging feature of the change process across the seven domains of change is that it has no clear end point. To others, this may be why education will always remain vibrant and engaging. It is imperative that progress toward the intended outcomes established in the “aspiring to change” domain as well as the processes used in the attempt to reach these outcomes are evaluated (Bristow & Patrick, 2014). There is clearly an overlap with governance issues here, but evaluation is best seen in the same way students should experience assessment—as contributing to learning. Systems need to “reduce fear of failure by increasing opportunities for experimentation and learning from the results” (Milton, 2015, p. 17). As with students, educators and policy-makers need to see the connections between their systems and subsystems’ processes and outcomes so that they can meaningfully manipulate processes to reach the outcomes they desire.
The danger of evaluation efforts is that they can be used for only punitive accountability reasons, as Milton (2015) describes, and therefore become an obstacle to improvement. If educators are treated in the same manner as students—as learners who want to improve and who will improve given appropriate feedback and support—evaluation can be a key contributor in system transformation. Program evaluation should therefore focus not on predetermined outcomes that are based on previous understandings of success in teaching, but instead on outcomes as they relate to the processes, and contribute to the improvement of these processes rather than simply highlighting failures.
For more information, and to consult the references indicated above, please click here to download the pan-Canadian systems-level framework on Global Competencies.
Key Points of Continuing Change
· Evaluation of outcomes supports the change process, linking processes to outcomes and informing continuous improvement.
· Evaluation assumes that everyone at all levels in the system can learn and grow.
· A cultural shift may need to happen to ensure that evaluation is seen and experienced across the system as positively contributing to learning rather than punitively shining a spotlight on shortcomings. This mirrors the approach taken with student-assessment approaches in competency-based education.
