Narrow Your Focus

TASK 3: Choose one program within your organization that you are interested in evaluating. This will be your “focus program” that you will work with throughout the course. You will review this focus program repeatedly from multiple perspectives and, by the end of the course, have designed a complete evaluation plan for your program. 

If this is your first experience with evaluation, choose a lesson/activity/program about 60-90 minutes in length that has a clearly defined audience. You should be very familiar with this program already. It might be a lesson you personally designed, a program you frequently lead in your workplace (e.g., a single field trip offering, an outreach presentation in a classroom, an activity you do at all your public events), an activity from a published curriculum (e.g., a Project Learning Tree or Project Wild lesson you regularly use), or something else entirely. Ideally, you should have a written copy of the lesson plan or activity description for this focus program for reference throughout the course. 

If you have already had some experience with evaluation, you can consider expanding your focus by choosing a longer-term program (e.g., a year-long high school internship program, a preschooler + family program, a themed week at a summer camp). You can choose a suite of offerings (e.g., school field trip programs, adult learner certification program) that you want to evaluate as a whole. You can also choose a “program” that doesn’t serve participants at all but is a defining aspect of your operations (e.g., a volunteer program, facility accessibility, staff training, DEI efforts).

If for any reason you do not have your own activity or lesson to use, you can use this sample Classroom Garden lesson (or click here to open in this window). 
  • Click File > Make a Copy, or download as a Word document, to edit as your own. 
  • Be sure to mentally walk through this lesson to consider how you might teach it if you were asked to do so today.