Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (Soldier Creek Music Series; 4) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

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.