Discover planning, monitoring and evaluating your practice for yourself

What is it?
A systematic approach to identifying areas of work, monitoring progress and assessing the impact of your work.

Who should do it?
The short answer is everybody.  

Why do it?
It is a tool for understanding the impact of your work on individuals, community groups and communities.  

When to do it?
It is important to identify appropriate, planned outcomes in advance.

You should programme evaluations for important points in the life of a project, when specific targets or goals should be reached, or at its end.

How to make it manageable?
It should be integral to the work and built into your practice as a normal aspect of work. It is likely to cause the greatest upset and be least effective when it is bolted on as an afterthought. Evidence should be collected on an ongoing basis. This makes processing and analysing the evidence manageable when the evaluation milestone arrives.

What are evaluation criteria?
These are the reference points against which to evaluate, for example, the impacts of your intend outcomes. These reference points or criteria must be identified in advance. They must be concrete and robust so that you can evaluate against them.

What is evidence and how to use it?
Evidence is proof of something happening or having happened. It may be quantitative, which is numerical, dealing with issues such as how much, how many or how often. It may also be qualitative which addresses factors such as how good, how effective, how well, or how confident.

Questions to ask before collecting evidence are:

• what are we seeking evidence of?

• what are the sources of evidence and what will they tell us?

• are there three mutually reinforcing sources of evidence for triangulation?

• how will we collect the evidence?

• who will collect the evidence and when?

• how will we analyse the evidence?

• how will we use the evidence?

Analysing your evidence.
Having obtained the evidence it must be analysed so that it can inform judgments on future action, whether to continue as before, or to take action to improve performance.

The following interactive pdf forms can either be printed out then completed OR completed online then printed.

At present the interactive pdfs cannot be saved and emailed.

If a signature is required please return them to the appropriate office.

Support material generated within Dundee

Learner Details

Confirmation of Learner Details

Programme Details

Register

Register Continuation Sheet

Record of Outcomes

Project Planning Form

Meeting Notes

Materials that support our learning process:

Individual Learning Plan

Group Learning Plan

Learner Diary

Session Plan and Reflection Form (version 1)

Session Plan and Reflection Form (version 2)

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How Good is our Community Learning and Development2?
(HMIe)

LEAP
(Glasgow University)

Delivering Change - Understanding the outcomes of CLD
(Scottish Government)    

Working and Learning Together            
(Scottish Government)

Effective Self-Evaluation in Community Learning and Development - a guide for practitioners and managers
(Scottish Government)    

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Email: discover.learning@dundeecity.gov.uk
Telephone: (01382) 66 66 65

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