I made the colouring book

July 16, 2019 Ciaran Camman

I tweeted a joke about making an adult colouring book with reflective questions on each page for evaluators and it found a VERY receptive audience, so….. I made a prototype! You can download the PDF here. I hope you all colour your way to some satisfying insights! Comment or tweet and tell me what you think, or show off your masterpieces for us all to enjoy. :D

Shout-out to André Luiz (@andreluizgollo) for putting up some great repeating pattern icons on The Noun Project that I was able to turn into the artwork for this colouring book.

the coffee is largely metaphorical

July 10, 2019 Ciaran Camman

I can’t recall for certain, but I think the first person I “had coffee” with in a professional capacity was my friend Brian Hoessler, a fellow evaluation consultant and now my co-host on our evaluation-themed podcast, Eval Cafe. And of course the podcast is all about, as we say in our intro, “informal chats on evaluation-related topics. The kind you might overhear a your favourite coffee shop, if your favourite coffee shop was frequented by evaluators.” I guess we really set the tone with that first conversation!

sensitizing (dis)comfort

March 18, 2019 Ciaran Camman

There’s a really great device that Michael Quinn Patton suggests using in developmental evaluation called ‘sensitizing concepts’. He’s borrowed it from qualitative research methods as a way of providing guidance to inquiry in complexity. Here’s a definition he gives in his qualitative methods book that came out a few years ago:

“Sensitizing concepts are terms, phrases, labels, and constructs that invite inquiry into what they mean to people in the setting(s) being studied. ... Qualitative inquiry using sensitizing concepts leaves terms purposefully undefined to find out what they mean to people in a setting. Sensitizing concepts are windows into a group’s worldview.”