"Great participatory format, talking to the views of a wide range of practitioners, exploring the challenges of evaluation and some of the assumptions we make"

"Very informative, excellent info on RISC. Interesting to hear from people- many experiences!"

On the 4th and 5th of February IDEA ran a training in Dublin and Belfast entitled "Evaluation: Practice to Theory."

The training was facilitated by Louise Robinson of Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC) and Susan Gallwey of the Waterford One World Centre. We started both days with an exercise using images to share participants' impressions of evaluation. This was followed by an exploration of the challenges of evaluating Dev Ed in particular. Lots of discussions and experience-sharing was conducted between participants on this topic.

Next, Louise introduced her organisation, RISC, and explained the evolution of the evaluation toolkit "How Do We know It's Working" from an intervention with local schools to a long-term programme over 6 years. During this time RISC took baseline measurements of school children across 3 different year groups. They gave ther esults to the local schools and asked the teachers "How would you like these results to look in 2 years time? How can we help?" Teachers were supported in a avriety of ways to introduce global justice, sustainability and action for change into their classroom. RISC then returned after 2 years and after 4 years to facilitate the same activities with the same children. Results, both quantitative and qualitative were recorded. RISC analysed the results and fed them back to the teachers again.

After this introduction Louise invited us to sample a carousel of 10 activities from the toolkit. In groups of 3 or 4 participants completed each activity and discussed with each other how it might work in their own contexts.

After a quick break Louise shared the results of RISC's school-based programme, as well as actual documents made by children during the baseline measurements. This helped to give a sense of what data could be collected from the activities and how they might be recorded and analysed.

The day was closed by Susan who brought participants back to the challenges they identified in the morning. She asked everyone to consider how, using the toolkit, or something else they had learned during the day, they might begin to address those challenges. Post-it notes soon proliferated, an indication that the toolkit had given participants lots of ideas- but also lots of new questions. The combination of thinking about evaluation in relation to development education with this practical example of the toolkit seemed to work well in stimulating discussions and new ideas and perspectives on the whole theme.

“I have looked at the toolkit before but today gave me a chance to really engage with it and its implications for DE. Raised lots of difficult to answer questions which I’ll continue to reflect on. Also, glad to have some concrete ideas to take away!”

Find Out More

A record of participants' comments has been made and you can download it below.

A blog post on the ideas and burning questions from both days can be found in the DISCUSS section of this website.

You can also start your own discussion on this topic in our members' forum (you will need to request a log-in and password from IDEA if you don't already have one).