1st Announcement: important dates for your diary!
Evaluation Professional Development Workshop – November 19-20th, 2015
Venue: Federal Office of Justice, Berne, Switzerland
Course Facilitator: Bob Williams specialist in applying Systems Concepts to Evaluation
Course Organiser and Contact Person: Marlène Läubli Loud
Tel: 026 411 37 80 or 079 251 83 36
Email:
Once again we are delighted to inform you about opportunities for improving practice in evaluation. Following on with our theme “dealing with complexity in evaluation”, in collaboration with the Swiss Evaluation Association (SEVAL) we are organising an important professional development course to take place in Berne, in November, 2015.
To ensure you have the dates already in your diary, please find below a short outline of the course. More details will be sent to you in June 2015.
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Demand for using systems concepts in evaluation has grown considerably in the past few years. Consequently there’s increased interest in the specific ways that systems thinking can be applied to evaluation. One of the most significant areas for this is in evaluation design. This workshop therefore focuses primarily on evaluation design although the approach can be applied to all stages of the evaluation endeavour.
Systems approaches embody three main features;
· understand inter-relationships,
· engage with multiple perspectives and
· reflect on boundary choices.
Evaluation is fundamentally about identifying perspectives and assigning boundaries that determine what is “worthwhile” and what is not “worthwhile”. Yet ironically evaluators’ focus on inter-relationships can overshadow the importance of identifying and critically examining multiple perspectives on those inter-relationships when determining program and evaluation purposes, and reflecting and challenging the boundaries set when deciding criteria for judging worth. This means that evaluators have many more methods available to them that help identify inter-relationships, and far fewer methods that critically examine perspectives and boundary. Adopting ideas and approaches from the systems field could help overcome this deficit.
This highly interactive workshop will demonstrate how to use inter-relationships, perspectives and boundary ideas - drawn primarily from the soft and critical systems fields - to develop evaluation purpose, evaluation criteria and evaluation questions.
Day One will focus on the basic application of systems concepts using case studies. On Day Two attendees will be encouraged to bring their own work to bear on more detailed explorations.
About Bob Williams
Bob Williams has been interested in the application of systems concepts into evaluation for many years. He has written two books, run many workshops and penned a couple of dozen articles on this topic. An ebook ‘Wicked Solutions; a systems approach to complex problems ’ was published in 2014. He serves on the editorial board of three evaluation journals and one systems journal, and helped established the systems and evaluation specialist topic group in the American Evaluation Association. In 2014 he received the prestigious American Evaluation Association’s Lazarsfeld Award primarily for his work on bringing the systems and evaluation fields closer together.
Over the years and in a variety of different roles he’s worked in just about every area of the public sector. Currently his work includes higher education issues in the US and the blending of environmental and public health in S.E. Asia. Originally from the UK, he is now based in New Zealand but most of his work is in Europe, North America and South East Asia.