​I got a classmate’s work and I require a comment on each one.

I don’t understand this English question and need help to study.

Please make a comment for each work. Your comment must be related to the work and make sense. Also, you can give an example or evidence that supports your comment.

Here below an example:

“It is interesting the institution you speak of appears to have the misconception that education can be scrubbed of politics. By choosing not to support antiracism as a goal or outcome, the institution’s leadership is establishing an agenda and committing a political act. Being a change agent requires reaching into the community to build alliances with others who share the same “political” goals followed up with powerful “voice” well thought action to speak truth to power– easily said.”

See attached.

Work 1))

Calms my anxiety

I appreciated Michale Quinn Patton’s voice in the video provided. For some reason he seemed more calm than I imagined. The quiet thoughtfulness he presented impressed me. I like to see, hear and get know the authors of the works I read.

Although evident in his text, in this short video Patton easily puts to rest some of the anxiety I have about program evaluation. I am not sure what the source of the anxiety is, maybe simply the word “evaluation?” But, I think it is really more than that for me. “Evaluation” implies a fair amount of logic, effort and planfulness. Which is a good thing, that does not make me anxious. But, evaluation implies more of these than most programs have embedded from the beginning. Consequentially, the task of evaluating seems daunting and ignites my anxiety. Yet, as he illustrated in his example of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), many successful programs are formed in messy ways, often not following logic plans and with no initial plan or attempt to assess. His honoring of the emergent nature of real programmatic solutions to complex problems is the heart of his developmental evaluation. Often times, evaluation emerges and evolves hand in glove with a program. Evaluation may not even be considered until the program is well into implementation. Even so, whenever inserted developmental evaluation has a place and role in providing feedback to stakeholders. Developmental evaluation can begin slow and pick up steam over time, or it can be conducted in a robust, comprehensive way. Thinking of the diversity of ways evaluation can take shape is encouraging as I see my colleagues plunge forward with educational programs during this pandemic. Programs which I am sure have very little, if any, front end loading of an evaluation plan (ack! there is my anxiety again). With the promise of developmental evaluation we begin the evaluation when we can. . . as long as we do!

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work 2 ))

Thoughts about Elephants and Antiracism

An interesting tension I’ve found between Patton (2012), Gullickson (2020), and McBride et al. (2020) is where each author places the primary intended users in the evaluation process. For Patton, the primary intended users are at the heart of evaluation, in the thick of it with the evaluators. For Gullickson (2020), the primary intended users seem to be in the margins, in the “potential activities,” with the evaluators and evaluation/judgement at the center (p. 3). For McBride et al. (2020), the primary intended users seem to be agents to influence, direct, and shape in the service of social change. This is just a tension I’m noticing.

I really love the arrangement of competencies (ie: logic of evaluation, critical thinking, understanding about subjective/objective claims, worldviews and values) as central to evaluation in Gullickson (2020, p. 6). It helps me to understand HOW to approach the “activities of evaluation,” which I am interpreting as similar to Patton’s (2012) steps of asking prioritizing questions, conducting the situation analysis, and so on. I also think McBride et al. (2020) would explicitly add the concept of evaluators addressing antiracism with primary intended users to Gullickson’s (2020) ideas of worldviews and values in evaluation.

One specific question I have is: how do we help program leaders and primary intended users to “build data systems that provide evidence of disparities, guide the design and implementation of programs in a way that addresses social ills and help institutions ask questions regarding their own role in supporting inequitable structures” with users who do not, cannot, or will not see antiracism as a necessary aim (McBride et al., 2020, p. 123)?

In a public K-12 institution with whom I work, the leaders pay lip service to antiracist efforts, especially in light of recent public pressure, yet, when designing a student-centered program, the same leaders bristled at the inclusion of “antiracism” as a goal or outcome. They were worried that the language would be seen as “political” or that the criteria would be read as a “liberal agenda.” I would be grateful for any ideas about how we are to accomplish the goals of becoming a change-agent when organizations or primary intended users refuse to acknowledge certain worldviews or are set against the desperately needed change.