This week I chat with Tiffany Smith and Libby Smith about our experiences teaching a course on interpersonal effectiveness in the MS in Applied Psychology program at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. We also discuss why teaching interpersonal skills is important and why we believe these skills can and should be explicitly taught.

The course is a 3-credit, 8-week course that focuses on developing self-awareness through personal and collaborative reflective practice. It is the third course in the evaluation concentration. Tiffany brought this course to our evaluation program and taught it from 2015-17. Libby then taught it from 2018-19, bringing in new elements. Dana taught it most recently in an online environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tiffany [Smith] Tovey: Tiffany [Smith] Tovey (she/her) is a researcher, program evaluator, and educator who focuses on the importance of reflective practice, epistemological awareness, and interpersonal communication in her work and life.

She is currently the senior evaluation specialist at the Office of Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Services in the Educational Research Methodology department at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

At UNCG, she leads and facilitates numerous evaluation and research projects in K12 education, higher education, and community settings. She also teaches workshops and courses in interpersonal skills, reflective practice, research methods (qualitative and quantitative), and evaluation.

She has a Ph. D. in Educational Psychology and Research with a focus on Evaluation, Statistics, and Measurement and a cognate in Communication Studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as well, and thus very much enjoys a good, deep, philosophical conversation.

Libby Smith: Libby Smith (she/they) is an organizational healing facilitator, as an experienced and holistic evaluator and educator she excels at the human component of evaluation and organizational change. Never one to shy away from crucial conversations, Libby deftly balances accountability and compassion.

Their work focuses on building equity and accessibility through personal growth & embodiment practices. Libby uses all of these skills to provide intersectional and liberation-forward guidance to organizations and clients seeking transformative change.

She has an MS in Applied Psychology works for Catalyst at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where she also serves as Program Director for the MS Applied Psychology program.

She has been practicing breathwork since 2018, primarily with the guidance of Amy Kuretsky, and has trained in breathwork healing with David Elliott She loves to walk in the woods, take photos and is auntie to 11 year old twin girls. You can learn more about her work at workwithlibby.com

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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This week I chat with Dr. Aisha Rios to both get to know her a little better and to talk about social justice in evaluation.

"My name is Aisha Rios. I founded Coactive Change in early 2020 after working for several years as an external evaluator with consulting firms functioning at the federal, state, and local levels. My passion for social change and justice permeates my participatory and collaborative approach to working with partners, and these values ground my belief in the power of evaluation as a means to facilitate learning and change. I have engaged in grassroots organizing and community building that focused on issues ranging from the exploitation of adjuncts who are overworked and underpaid, and most recently the abolition of the prison industrial complex. The work I am most proud of has centered on dismantling structural violence by way of social movement and community organizing, both directly and in supporting other change agents."

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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I've received multiple questions about my podcasting setup and process. Rather than answer the questions individually, I thought I would podcast about it! I discuss why I got into podcasting, my recording technology and room setup, the audio processing my husband (aka audio engineer) does, podcast hosting, the general timeline for me to create an episode, and some extra few questions.

Technology

Also check out this blog post by Echo Rivera: The Ultimate Guide to Microphones

Contact

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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This episode I chat with Ann Webb Price and Susan Wolfe about coalition evaluation, partnering together in evaluation, the independent consulting TIG of AEA, and so much more!

Ann Webb Price: Ann Price is a community psychologist and evaluator based in Georgia. She helps community coalitions, and nonprofit and foundation leaders identify the root causes of social problems and harness their evidence in order to create real community change. Ann is active in AEA, mentors new and emerging evaluators through her office hours and the Independent Consulting IC Chats, and speaks and trains on evaluation and community coalitions. Ann blogs regularly about community coalitions, evaluation use, and evaluation for non-evaluators and in 2021 will launch her new podcast called Community Possibilities.

Susan Wolfe: Susan Wolfe enjoys evaluation work when it is complex and challenging while focusing on equity and social justice. She has been a Community Consultant with Susan Wolfe and Associates since 2009 where much of her work focuses on community coalitions. In 2020 she teamed up with Ann Webb Price and Kyrah K. Brown to co-edit an issue of New Directions for Evaluation – Evaluating Community Coalitions and Collaboratives.

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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In this episode, I chat with Aasha Joshi and Hannah Lantos about their recent chapter "Demystifying data: Strategies and tools for making data more meaningful in OST programs" in the recently released book Measure, Use, Improve! Data Use in Out-of-School Time, edited by Christina Russell and Corey Newhouse. The book will be particularly useful to leadership-level staff in out-of-school time organizations that are thinking about deepening their own learning and evaluation systems, yet aren’t sure where to start.

Aasha Joshi: Aasha’s work is guided by three questions: What’s being done? Is it working? And how can we make it work better? For 15 years, she has been advising, designing, conducting, managing, and integrating robust research and evaluation in organizations so that they can improve their processes, services, and products to meet their goals and make a positive difference in people’s lives. Aasha earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Cambridge (UK), studying social interactions and knowledge sharing, and is a co-founder of Clarity Writing and Research, a company formed with a commitment to helping people achieve better outcomes in the education and social sectors.

Hannah Lantos: Hannah Lantos, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist in the Youth Development research area at Child Trends. She has served as project director on both large and small projects that have focused on social and emotional learning, teen pregnancy prevention, protective factors for youth involved in the justice system, and integrating a positive youth development approach into job skills training programs for young adults. She completed her Ph.D. in Public Health with a focus on social and behavioral trends in adolescent health from Johns Hopkins University in 2015. Her work broadly aims to explore how the social and physical environments that adolescents live in affect their health and well-being. Adolescence is a time of amazing growth, skill-building, and navigating challenges. Learning how to navigate challenges in ways that promote learning, kindness, and health drive her work. In particular, she is interested in how contexts can strengthen adolescents’ resiliency as they learn about and engage in healthy decision-making. She has worked with both large, national datasets and small, evaluations and with both quantitative and qualitative data in both domestic and international settings. Before her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins, where she wrote a dissertation comparing adolescent’s experiences with violence in Baltimore and Johannesburg, she worked primarily in international settings. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in northern Zambia before receiving a Masters of Public Administration in International Development (MPA-ID) and speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and can still say hello in Bemba (one of the languages spoken in northern Zambia!). She is passionate about applied, multidisciplinary research on adolescent health, well-being, positive development, and in considering the “whole child” as we do research and evaluation on programs that serve young people.

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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Thank you to everyone who participated in the call-in to share their own reflections about the 2020 AEA virtual experience!

In this episode, I start with thanking the conference organizers, sharing my own reflections, and then pass it off to the eight people who called in to share their own reflections:

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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Thank you to everyone who participated in the call-in to share their own reflections about the 2020 AEA virtual experience! After the conference, please sure your own thoughts and reflections by calling in. It's very similar to leaving a voicemail!

In this episode, I start with my own reflection about the conference, how I'm going to make the most of the conference, and what I am personally excited about. Then, we get to hear from nine other evaluators (in no particular order):

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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This week, Chari Smith joins me to talk about nonprofit evaluation, how to build a culture of evaluation, the relationship between music and evaluation, and the AEA conference.

Chari Smith wrote a book! Nonprofit Program Evaluation Made Simple: Get your Data. Show your Impact. Improve your Programs. Sign up for the mailing list to learn more about the book, including the launch date.

Chari Smith believes evaluation should be accessible, practical and usable. She founded Evaluation into Action, located in Portland, Oregon, to help nonprofit professionals create realistic and meaningful program evaluation processes. She has taught several workshops helping nonprofit professionals understand the value and use of program evaluation. Her book comes out fall 2020: Nonprofit Program Evaluation Made Simple: Get Your Data. Show Your Impact. Improve Your Programs.

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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This week I am joined by David Keyes. We talked about R, why evaluators should learn R, tips for teaching courses, and more!

Interested in getting started with R? Check out David's free course!

Interested in learning how to do inferential statistics in R? Check our our new course!

Blog posts

Other resources

Some packages: tidyverse, beepr, praise, janitor, gt, gtsummary, lavaan, ggplot, rstatix, papaja

David Keyes is the founder of R for the Rest of Us. Through online courses and custom trainings, he helps people and organizations learn R, the most powerful tool for data analysis and visualization (which also happens to be free).

In addition to training folks to use R, David does consulting work with research and evaluation organizations, foundations, and others. David's creates high-quality data visualization, helps organizations to use R to improve their workflow, and much more.

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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ThisThis week I am joined by Ann K. Emery about her journeys in evaluation and entrepreneurship. Ann K. Emery is an internationally-acclaimed speaker who equips organizations to get their data out of dusty spreadsheets and into real-world conversations. She now runs Depict Data Studio.

If you’d rather watch this talk, you can do so on YouTube here.

Ann K. Emery is an internationally-acclaimed speaker who equips organizations to get their data out of dusty spreadsheets and into real-world conversations.

Each year, she delivers over 50 keynotes, workshops, and webinars with the aim of equipping organizations to visualize data more effectively.

She has been invited to speak in more than 30 states and 10 countries; more than 3,200 people have enrolled in her online training academy; and she has consulted to more than 150 organizations, including the United Nations, Centers for Disease Control, and Harvard University.

She earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a Master’s degree from George Mason University.

Ann resides in Florida along with her husband and two daughters.

Music by Matt Ingelson, http://www.mattingelsonmusic.com/

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