Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations

Hallie Preskill · Rosalie T. Torres

oct 1998 · SAGE Publications

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How does evaluative inquiry contribute to your organizational learning? How do you practice evaluative inquiry to maximize individual and team learning? Offering you a way of thinking about and conducting evaluative inquiry in every kind of organization, Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations provides a data-based approach to organizational learning and change. By focusing on the use of evaluative inquiry processes within organizations rather than across large-scale, multisite programs, authors Hallie Preskill and Rosalie T. Torres are able to bridge the gap between what research "says" about individual, team, and organizational learning and what it "says" about evaluation. The authors lay the foundation and context for evaluative inquiry by including:

- How organizations are changing.

- What it means to learn at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

- The four learning processes that facilitate evaluative inquiry.

Through the use of an illustrative case, the authors guide you through the three phases of evaluative inquiry - from focusing the inquiry to developing action plans. Also included are interviews from four different organizations: Land O′Lakes, Colorado Department of Education, Ford Motor Company, and Presbyterian Hospital and Healthcare Services. These interviews allow you to "hear" how participants perceived and experienced these procedures. This exciting volume concludes with additional considerations when practicing evaluative inquiry, including an exploration of the evaluator′s role and challenges to implementing evaluative inquiry in today′s organizations.

Written for evaluators, managers, consultants, and trainers, Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations shows you how to integrate evaluative inquiry into your organization′s work processes so that its members are better able to make their organizations successful.

Acerca del autor

Hallie Preskill, PhD. is a Managing Director with FSG, a global nonprofit strategy, evaluation, and research consulting firm (since 2009), and leads the firm’s Strategic Learning and Evaluation practice. In her role as a senior advisor, she works on a wide variety of evaluation and learning projects. Sample clients include the Kresge Foundation, MasterCard Foundation, Knight Foundation, The California Endowment, Missouri Foundation for Health, Norlien Foundation, Packard Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, Blue Shield of CA Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She has helped evaluate a wide range of initiatives and programs related to community information needs, substance abuse, early learning, poverty, arts and culture, teacher professional development, domestic and sexual violence, economic development, youth and education, and healthcare. Prior to joining FSG, Hallie spent more than 20 years in academia, teaching graduate level courses in program evaluation, training design and development, organizational learning, appreciative inquiry and consulting. Her research has focused on evaluation capacity building, transfer of learning/training, evaluation use, and evaluation as a catalyst for individual, team, and organizational learning. Hallie’s other books include: Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry (2006, with T. Catsambas), Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance & Change (2001, 2009, with D. Russ-Eft), Evaluation Strategies for Effective Strategies for Communicating and Reporting (2005, with R. T. Torres and M. Piontek), and Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (1999, with R. T. Torres), and Becoming the Change: What One Organization Working To Transform Educational Systems Learned About Team Learning and Change (2011, with R. Babiera). Hallie was the 2007 President of the American Evaluation Association. She received the American Evaluation Association′s Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Outstanding Professional Practice in 2002 and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. Hallie holds a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rosalie T. Torres, Ph.D. is President of Torres Consulting Group, an evaluation and management consulting firm that specializes in the feedback-based development of programs and organizations. Formerly, she was the Director of Research, Evaluation, and Organizational Learning at the Developmental Studies Center (DSC), an educational, nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. She earned her Ph.D. in research and evaluation in 1989 from the University of Illinois. Over the past 27 years, she has conducted more than 60 evaluations in education, business, health care, and nonprofit organizations, holding both internal and external evaluator positions. She has authored/coauthored numerous books and articles articulating practice-based theories of evaluation use; the relationship between evaluation and individual, team, and organizational learning; and communicating and reporting evaluation findings. Among them are Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (Preskill & Torres, 1999) and Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting: Enhancing Learning in Organizations (Torres, Preskill, & Piontek, 1996). She is a recent past Board Member of the American Evaluation Association, and served as the Staff Director for the 1994 revision of the Joint Committee’s Program Evaluation Standards. She has taught graduate level research and evaluation courses at Western Michigan University and the University of Colorado (Denver and Colorado Springs campuses), and routinely conducts workshops on various topics related to evaluation practice.