Reflecting on my time in LDT 506, I have seen many opportunities where I have been able to improve as a learning designer. I feel as though my time examining different evaluation practices has been meaningful, and I feel like I now have a new perspective on how to conduct proper evaluations, which I hope to be able to use in my future career. Overall, I am happy with the knowledge that I have gained through this course and can't wait to apply my knowledge of evaluations more often in the future.
Most recently, I have taken a self-assessment about where I personally stand as an evaluator. The self-assessment made me think about where I am currently at with being able to conduct proper and meaningful evaluations. It was found that after some reflection, I would be at an advanced or expert level in most areas of the evaluation process. On my self-assessment, I gave myself mostly scores between 4-6, with most scores being 5 or 6, which would indicate me to be at an advanced or expert level. Before starting this course, I assumed that I already had a good understanding of evaluation practices due to previous jobs I'd had. However, after spending time in this course learning and reflecting on different evaluation practices, I am now confident in my experience and believe I have a good understanding of the evaluation process.
As I stated, I do think that in a lot of ways I would consider myself at an advanced or expert level; however, upon taking the self-assessment and reflecting on where I stand as an evaluator, I do think that I have several strengths and weaknesses and areas that I would love to grow in more.
Strengths:
I work well on team projects and can effectively communicate my ideas to all stakeholders. I am good at handling conflict and do really well with handling conflict while still getting my ideas across in a way that does not dismiss how others feel. On one of my most recent projects, I had a team member who did not want to communicate the same way the rest of the team did, which would have made doing our project more complicated, so I gave my suggestion and kind of walked her through why this idea could be better, and then she was able to understand once I explained the reason behind why we wanted to do things the way we did.
I have a lot of experience working with people from diverse backgrounds, and I feel as though I do well at trying to be unbiased and culturally responsive. I also practice equitable practices and feel as though I am respectful throughout the evaluation process. I have previously worked in careers where I would have to conduct evaluations, speak to other SMEs, and work with people with diverse backgrounds with various levels of expertise, so I think that this has made me learn how to speak with people professionally and be more understanding.
Last, I am really good with the evaluation planning process and getting things done on time. While working on team projects, I tend to act as the leader when working with my team on how to facilitate different pieces of how the evaluation will be shown or implemented. On my latest project, I would create all the documents for my team to use so we could build our evaluation and would ask my team what roles they wanted to work on for each piece of the project.
Weakness:
One area of weakness that I was able to reflect on while taking the self-assessment was being able to identify how evaluation practice can promote social justice and the public good. I feel like this is something that I struggle with being able to implement in my evaluation practice. On the self-assessment, I gave myself a score of 4. Although I have knowledge of this idea, I think I struggle to implement it depending on what the needs of the evaluation are and what the project's topic is.
Social justice and public good should actually be a much bigger part of the evaluation process than I had previously made them to be, and this is one thing that surprised me during the self-assessment. Social justice is mainly about how resources are divided. When you are doing projects, most likely there will be some costs involved when planning a project, so if you are spending money somewhere that doesn't make sense or not spending money on things that you should be spending money then can the evaluation really be as effective as you want it to be? It also is not good for anyone who is reviewing your evaluation, it might cause them to have questions or concerns about the project and I think it is important to have evaluations be clear and concise especially if a long of money and time is involved.
Based on the results of the self-assessment, I would say that the biggest thing that I would want to do going forward is make sure that I am practicing how to give strong evaluations more. I would love to continue to gain experience in all fields so that I can hopefully become an expert evaluator in all areas of self-assessment. I would love to be able to use the knowledge I have gained and continue my studies on evaluator theories to provide quality evaluations in the future so that I can conduct and create better evaluations for my future career as a learning designer.
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