Coaching
Practical Hands-On Help
If you’ve just attended a conference presentation, workshop, or course on a new approach, you are probably excited to share your expertise with colleagues or give it a shot yourself. But when you do, you find that it’s not quite as easy as it sounded!
What next?
One of the most powerful ways to get the most out of your learning investment is to follow it up with some expert help, either in person or via Skype or webinar.
Contact Jane now to discuss how she can help you achieve a quantum leap to high-value evaluation in weeks to months.
Testimonials from Evaluators
Not sure whether or how evaluation coaching might be useful to you? Here are some comments from evaluators and evaluation teams Jane has coached.
Quigley and Watts
We are passionate about work that enables communities to flourish. We work with Government and community organisations to understand complex issues using a wide range of tools including social research methods, health in all policies (HiAP), health impact assessment (HIA) and evaluation.
We have worked with Jane on several evaluations and I can’t recommend her coaching highly enough. Rather than being a cost, Jane’s input saves us time and money and results in a clear and focused evaluation approach.
Clients love it too, they can see we are serious about providing the best possible evaluation with input from an international expert. Clients have also commended us on our commitment to professional development; using this approach everyone wins!
We explicitly factor in the cost of the coaching into our proposals under expert advice, typically at three points, framing the evaluation, developing the evaluative criteria and rubrics and then sense making and reporting.
As a company that uses a range of approaches to understand complex issues having access to the depth of evaluation wisdom Jane holds is invaluable. It is the best professional development we participate in and it directly benefits our business.
Jane is very generous sharing tips and tricks and providing examples directly relevant to each evaluation. I have learnt more from Jane through coaching than any post-graduate paper or course I have undertaken. She has a knack of meeting you where you are and then asking great questions to expand your thinking.
The outcome of Jane’s guidance and encouragement has been a real change in my practice and confidence to take on new more challenging evaluation work.
Jane is inspiring, incredibly knowledgeable and very practical.
– Carolyn Watts, Quigley and Watts
Oregon Community Foundation
Jane has been instrumental in our work as we undertake a principles-based, developmental evaluation of our Studio to School Initiative. Her keen eye and sharp focus have helped us immensely as we develop a rubric to understand how and how well the principles we’ve developed are embodied by the projects we fund.
Jane has guided us through a multitude of evaluation decisions, providing critical feedback on draft materials for meetings with stakeholders and for assessment materials that we use for data collection activities.
A simple conversation with Jane always results in new insight, and we leave our meetings with her with a renewed sense of clarity. Through our work with Jane and others, we are finding that engaging with experts is our preferred approach to complex evaluation work, as well as a crucial way to develop the capacity of our team and build confidence in our own work. We can only hope that other experts we work with in the future will stand up to the precedent that Jane has set for us.
— Research team at The Oregon Community Foundation
Center for Creative Leadership
In my role as a researcher and program evaluator at the Center for Creative Leadership, my focus area is helping our clients evaluate their leadership programs and other organizational leadership initiatives. Several of our clients are working to develop their leadership culture-the beliefs and practices in an organization that determine their approach to leadership.
We were challenged with how to measure progress in developing leadership culture-and do so in a meaningful way, given that it is not a simple construct to measure.
While we do use surveys routinely with our client work, it was suggested by a colleague that we might consider developing a rubric to help in our efforts to measure the development of leadership culture. We initially did some reading on our own, but we had a number of questions and needed guidance.
After just a few working sessions with Jane, we got our questions answered, we had some clear steps to follow, and we felt more confident that developing a rubric would be a helpful approach for our work.
As a result of getting the support we needed from Jane, we created a very useful leadership culture rubric that we’ve been using with our clients and further developing for the past year.
— Sarah Stawiski, Senior Evaluation Faculty, Center for Creative Leadership
Tapestry Evaluation
I have been working in the field of evaluation for about eight years, and as an independent consultant for four years.
I contacted Jane to ask her to review two evaluation projects and provide coaching or guidance. Both are complex, systems-level projects, and both will combine the use of evaluation rubrics and mixed methods causal inference (i.e. combining different methods to understand how a program led to desired outcomes).
After only two conversations of about one hour each, I can already see how helpful it is to engage Jane in this way. I had done a lot of reading and planning on my own, but found it exceptionally helpful to ask directed questions about my specific projects, to get clarification on areas that I find challenging, and to hear specific examples from Jane’s work. The conversations also helped me integrate some reading I had been doing about these more complex approaches to evaluation.
This was a relatively low cost way for me to validate and build on my knowledge in this area. I learned as much or more from these conversations than I have from some longer courses that were more general and less tailored to my specific questions or my specific evaluation projects.
– Robyn McLean, Principal Evaluator, Tapestry Evaluation & Strategy
Evaluation Specialists
Before meeting Jane, we knew of her work and reputation. We approached her to provide guidance on developing evaluative rubrics for two projects.
She provided invaluable help with the rubrics. Also, her ability to grasp the intricacies of these projects led her to ask useful questions and provide big-picture advice. Not only did the project work benefit, but we were able to build internal capacity at the same time.
Our experience showed us that everything Jane touches is better because of it. We hope to continue working with her in the future.
— Evaluation Specialists, a WOSB evaluation firm
