DONE… I THINK :)

Well, I can’t believe a year has already flown by… and now for most of us a year more to go and we are done! YAY

While I don’t know if evaluation is necessarily my favorite topic, I did learn alot about it and more than I ever expected to learn about appreciative inquiry.  As I look back on the paper we’ve created, I can’t believe all the work that we’ve put together to make this paper and I’m glad that we were able to put it together throughout the semester.  While I’m not sure if its necessarily “done” to the standards of evaluation,(I’m hoping it is…) I definitely tried my best to put it together and was thankful there was other examples to look at! It was interesting to put together a hypothetical evaluation and try to predict what people would pick. I think if someone were to ask me to put together an evaluation, I would definitely feel more comfortable putting it together now that I’ve taken this class. I definitely learned alot from the responses from everyone and just want thank all of you for giving me such great feedback!

Well its past midnight, and I think I can finally have a restful sleep and finally feel caught up with everything!

Good night everyone!

The countdown begins…

This week I revised all the corrections Kona gave me from last week and restructured my paper. I’m hoping that I get some feedback from the rough draft to make it even better because I know there is still some issues I need to hash out with it. I need to continue to work on my powerpoint and keep making it look visually interesting, and of course add some more content especially on the results and discussion section now that I’ve worked on them more. Looking forward to presenting!!! WHOOO HOOOO

The end is near…

This week, thanks to Veteran’s Day and having it off, I was able to really spend some time restructuring my paper and being close to done with the powerpoint. I think I enjoyed putting the powerpoint together more because I got to add graphics to it! Thanks to Kona reading my rough draft, I was able to look back and hash out some of the areas I was struggling in (using I instead of evaluator) and lengthening my discussion and redoing the results section more. I’m looking forward to getting this done and presenting!

The process continues…

Thoughts that you have about the course in general:  I have learned a great deal of appreciative inquiry and am thankful, like many people have said, that our final project was broken up throughout the semester so that it wouldn’t be as overwhelming at the end. At the time of forming each section, I was overwhelmed but it was worth it since we are getting to the end of the class.

Any questions that you have: I had posted my questions in the post for this week about using the interview and the survey questions and if I should keep them in or not.

Where you are in terms of your final course project: I have brought together everything from each section and spent this week rearranging the sections we have done throughout the semester and making them more into a paper format. I will be working on the results and discussion section this next week and working on the powerpoint hopefully

All the Parts Working as a Whole

The main purpose of an evaluation system is finding an effective design where “all parts are working as a whole” (101) . (I’m sure there’s some math equation that can be inserted here, but, my husband, Matt is the math person not me. ) Preskill went into detail about how to design an evaluation system, breaking it up very simply into certain compontents that deals with leadership,vision, implementation, and where are we getting the money to finance this evaluation. Preskill then talks about the inherent value of injecting AI into the mix, and how valuable it is for organizations to build on their successes and how all the parts are working together to be effeictve. By providing examples and having us look through the case studies this week, its interesting to see how AI is used in relation to developing an evaluation system. I was especially interested in the case study involving conflict resolution, and how it added value to the process and created a “constructive rather than punitive” process of evaluation. The last chapter of the book deals with evaluation capacity and having organizations continually conduct evaluations to better themselves and achieve their missions and goals.

I don’t know if I had any issues with the evaluation systems that Preskill talked about, but I do think she had some good points and solidified, in my mind, an understanding of how evaluation systems work and can be effective. The case studies helped to support the ideas brought about by Preskill and she definitely was able to sum up the book to where afterwards, I felt I had a pretty good grasp of AI and its positive effects on evaluation.

With the final course project, I still need to work on putting together the powerpoint presentation, results, and discussion section. I am very glad that we were able to do a little bit at a time throughout the semester because doing all the stuff we had already done for the class and attempting to do it all at once seems crazy right now . But being a visual learner and all, I am curious if we can use imagery as well to explain our project so that the powerpoint isn’t so text heavy. Just a thought

Instrumentation and the Idea Behind the “Think Aloud”

At the beginning of this week, I was one of the “lost ones” of our CTER group trying to figure out how to distinguish the difference between the interview questions and survey questions. I had to go back to the Preskill text and really look at how the questions differered. After Kona helped clarify the differences between the three activities this week, it helped me to develop the survey questions. I also, like many of you, bounced my survey questions off of fellow art teachers to see if I had missed anything in particular or what other questions I might need to add to get effective data and results.

The Idea behind the “Think Aloud” had good intentions but I felt it was all to simular to the same experience of interviewing with your dyad partner. Jillian I worked well together and made our meeting worthwhile by shooting questions back and forth and reflecting on each other and giving each other feedback on making the questions relatable, whether they dealt with students or teachers. Thanks Jillian for your feedback!

Interviewing

This week, after reading the Preskill chapter, I found it to be very helpful to see the difference between AI and non-AI questions. THe AI questions definitely seemed more personal and pushed the interviewee to a positive answer. I found the case studies to be very helpful in trying to help me understand specifically how I should formulate a interview guide for our group interviews this week.
With developing this interview guide, I struggled at the beginning to make sure my questions weren’t too lengthy, and they did get way too long! I had wrote the questions a couple days ago but apparently didn’t save them and a couple hours before I was supposed to meet Jillian, I had to rewrite the questions and try to remember what they were about. But it ended up I liked rewriting the questions again because I wasn’t persuaded by the questions in the book the second time around. The questions turned out better! I enjoyed discussing with Jillian how to reformulate the questions so that they made sense and were easier to understand and appreciated the fact that evaluators really have to be particular when coming up with effective AI positive questions.

And now because its Friday tomorrow, I want to get up and dance to this song that my students enjoy playing in the artroom!

Evaluation Questioning

When reading in the Preskill text about developing an evaluation plan, I come to the realization that the questions I ask are close to the questions I ask everyday when I teach digital photography and use Adobe Photoshop as a supplement to the class. Am I focusing too much on Photoshop and not enough on the camera? At the end of the day, many of the students in my class will not have Adobe Photoshop at home so what is the purpose of teaching the program.

Even in my own art department, we struggle and question the idea of using Adobe Photoshop and technology more and more in fear of loosing the fine art quality of art. Half of my department wants to push more for a use of technology in the classroom while others would like to keep the classes as they are. I’m not trying to say that all art should be created on the computer. But, students should definitely get some experience creating on the computer since many art careers now a days deal with some use of the computer whether it be through creating their own business cards or working in a graphic design firm. If anything, using image editing programs can always be another approach to teaching traditional methods of artmaking.

You have to Accentuate the positives, eliminate the negative…

Now that I finally got caught up on the readings, I finally think I have a handle on the appreciative inquiry idea.It is not seperate to traditional evaluation but works hand and hand and focuses on positive approaches to evaluation. In my posting this week, I did spend the time to compare the two, both AI and traditional evaluation. I found alot more focus on AI obviously since it is the focus of our text in the book over traditional evaluation. But I almost find AI to be tricky in that it never looks at the negatives. Sometimes I think looking at faults of the program through traditional evaluation and makes it a better program because you know how to improve it and make it better. Yes a positive approach is great but I don’t know if it fully helps you identify the problems so that way you can know what to improve on.

For example, when I go around evaluating my students on their artwork, I always like to start out with a negative but then end with a positive note such as “Your drawing of the eye of the face could have been done better by using this stroke of the pencil, but you did a great job blending on the rest of the face.” This approach of turning a negative into a positive is identical to the may simularities and differences between AI and traditional evalution and how they work together.

Comments on 3 other articles…

Doh! I forgot to comment on 3 other annnotation…. whoops!

I’d like to comment on Erik B’s Article on Classroom dynamics and inclusion: Improving classroom dynamics to improve student learning and social inclusion: a collaborative approach. I think he found a great article that is relatable to the classroom and classroom experiences and how AI was brought in to look at different experiences and relationships.I’d definitely like to read this article!

Dave’s article on Appreciative inquiry – the new frontier would be great for us to look at before looking at the Preskill text because it talks about the originators of AI and how they came about and what is to come with AI in the future.

As far as I know, Pam, Jennifer, and I (as far as I’ve seen) all did the e-learning article but I think each of us took something differently from the article. I don’t know if I’d take it as a scholarly article as Pam and I discussed because it didn’t have much background research or following on AI. I wasn’t sure if the AI section got lost within the article and was interested to see the other perspectives of both Pam and Jennifer on this article.