By Megha Bhavsar, Evaluation Co-ordinator, CAMH Education
Last month, CAMH Education’s Evaluation team shared a series of blog posts about the diverse educational evaluation projects that we led internally and externally (Part 1 and Part 2), our evaluation capacity-building initiatives (Part 3) and knowledge dissemination activities (Part 4). Now that you have some familiarity with evaluation in Education (our niche), this post aims to help you connect the dots between what we do and why we do this work.
As the Education department’s culture shifted to embrace evaluation, we heard this question more often than not, “How do we engage Evaluation?” This was the first indication that we needed to do some education. Increasingly, our expertise was requested on a variety of projects within the department and outside, sometimes relevant to our specialty–Education evaluation–and sometimes not. This convinced us that creating an Evaluation team strategy document should be a priority. We met for several brainstorming sessions, and our conversations came back to the same key ideas:
- We are working in a niche—education evaluation—with the aim to enhance teaching and learning. Evaluation is conducted collaboratively with project partners.
- Evaluation is valued and practiced in an environment that develops an evaluation culture.
- Evaluation supports continuous improvement through program-planning and decision-making.
- Data collection and analysis of meaningful metrics drives decision-making.
Using these ideas, we created a one-page document to convey our vision and mission, and to help answer your questions about evaluation in education and CAMH Education’s Evaluation team.
We look forward to bringing more information to you soon!
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