AEA eStudy Webinar: Beginner Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use

eStudy 011: Beginner Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use - Michael Quinn Patton
Dates: Mondays and Wednesdays May 7, 9, 14, & 16, 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM Eastern Time. For one registration fee, participants may attend 1 or all sessions. 
Length: 6 total contact hours 
Description: This eStudy is geared for an audience with beginner level expertise in developmental evaluation (DE). DE is especially appropriate for innovative initiatives or organizations in dynamic and complex environments where participants, conditions, interventions, and context are turbulent, pathways for achieving desired outcomes are uncertain, and conflicts about what to do are high. DE supports reality-testing, innovation, and adaptation in complex dynamic systems where relationships among critical elements are nonlinear and emergent. Evaluation use in such environments focuses on continuous and ongoing adaptation, intensive reflective practice, and rapid, real-time feedback. The purpose of DE is to help develop and adapt the intervention (different from improving a model).

This evaluation approach involves partnering relationships between social innovators and evaluators in which the evaluator’s role focuses on helping innovators embed evaluative thinking into their decision-making processes as part of their ongoing design and implementation initiatives. DE can apply to any complex change effort anywhere in the world. Through lecture, discussion, and small-group practice exercises, this workshop will position DE as an important option for evaluation in contrast to formative and summative evaluations as well as other approaches to evaluation.

This eStudy will occur in four 90-minute sessions and will include preparation materials sent before, between, and after the sessions.

Day 1 - The specific niche for which developmental evaluation is appropriate and useful.

Day 2 - Understanding and distinguishing five different types of DE and the implications of those types.

Day 3 - Implications of complexity concepts for DE theory & practice.

Day 4 - Practical frameworks and innovative methods for use in DE.

Presenter:  Michael Quinn Patton is an independent consultant based in Minnesota and former president of the American Evaluation Association. An internationally known expert on Utilization-focused Evaluation, this workshop is based on his book, Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use (Guilford, 2010).
Register: https://www.eval.org/webinar_reg/Registrationtop.asp 
Last day to register is Monday April 30