Know

Throughout this course, you have learned about what program management means for an infant-toddler caregiver. You have learned about the roles and responsibilities you assume on a day-to-day basis, the importance of collaborating with others, the importance of establishing and nurturing partnerships with families, and the significance of program management for program quality. Working with infants and toddlers and their families means that you will have very young, impressionable minds watching, listening, and learning from you. It means that you must interact with family members as partners along the way to care for children who are not fully able to communicate for themselves. And it means that you will need to work with colleagues to strive for high-quality care.

Throughout this process, how will you be able to know whether you are indeed providing high-quality services for children and families in your care? How are you currently determining whether you are doing a good job with infants and toddlers in your care? The answers to these questions are what program evaluation is all about.

Program Evaluation

Program evaluation is necessary in order to know whether or not a program is doing what it says it is doing. Program evaluation is typically completed on an annual basis in order to learn if the program is effectively meeting its goals. The findings of the program evaluation are typically shared with all the program’s stakeholders: families, staff, and in some cases, the community.

What does this mean for you?

While program evaluation is typically annual, evaluation of practice also can be done more frequently, and this involves all the things you do as a caregiver with infants, toddlers, and families on a daily basis. In your daily work with infants and toddlers, you plan experiences, activities, routines, and transitions. You carefully select materials and purposefully organize your environment so that it promotes optimum growth and development. As you implement your plans, it is important to look back and review what actually happened during a certain day, a certain week, or period of time. Doing that allows you to take into consideration important observations that tell you if things went well, or not so well and therefore need change. For example, you may notice that infants or toddlers in your care gravitate toward or away from certain materials or areas in your classroom. This kind of information can help you make decisions about maintaining or changing materials, the layout of your classroom, a certain routine, and so on.

Collaborating with Others for Program Evaluation

Leaders in your program (T&CS and your administrator) work with you and families to collect relevant data about program outcomes, analyze it, and use the findings to make changes that will improve overall program quality. Program relevant data might include the results of a survey given to family members asking them how well the program is meeting their child’s and family’s needs, that month’s curriculum and activity plans, or evidence from children’s portfolios or assessments that they are meeting developmental goals. The T&CS and your administrator will use this information to create a formal report or description of the program for those outside the program who are interested partners (families, advisory board members, etc.).

Formative Evaluation

Formative evaluation is used during the daily operation of the program to examine ongoing processes and to help improve the program. A formative evaluation examines day-to-day successes and challenges. It is often used when programs are just starting or a new policy has just been put into effect. Formative evaluation provides a fast feedback loop to influence program decisions and make necessary changes.

For example, your program T&CS observes two of the toddler classrooms each morning during your snack routine and leaves a brief note summarizing her observation in each teacher’s staff mailbox. Both of the toddler rooms were starting a new routine at snack time, and you and your infant-toddler colleague wanted your T&CS to observe snack several times to provide feedback about how it was working. At the end of two weeks, your T&CS meets with you and your infant-toddler colleague to discuss her observations over that period and to help you decide if the new routine was working well for the children and staff.

Summative Evaluation

A summative evaluation is typically conducted at the end of a program or after a program has been in existence for some time. The summative evaluation is often shared with those outside the program (advisory board, interagency council, funders) to provide data about the effectiveness of the program.

For example, each July your program manager writes an evaluation report. In it, she summarizes child data, family event data, child and family satisfaction data, and the overall program budget report. This report also highlights progress on the program’s goals (e.g., increase the number of family volunteers in infant-toddler classrooms). In many ways a summative evaluation report may be of interest to anyone affiliated with the program, but is also of importance to individuals outside the program.

Although a summative evaluation report might only be written and shared once per year, the information that is used to create the report is collected across the year at many different points and includes many different stakeholders (e.g., staff, families, advisory board members).

Evaluations may be conducted by a staff member who is internal to the program (e.g., T&CS or administrator), or the evaluation may be conducted by someone who is external to the program (e.g., paid consultant, higher-education personnel or state licensing representative with expertise in conducting program evaluations).

What are Indicators of Effective Program Evaluation?

You should familiarize yourself with the following indicators of effective program evaluation as stated by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education (NAECS/SDE) (2009):

• Evaluation is used for continuous improvement of your practice.
• Your goals for infants and toddlers become the guide for the evaluation.
• Evaluations are done by well-trained individuals; for example, your program leaders like your T&CS and administrator, or evaluations are done by individual experts external to your program.
• Multiple sources of data are used for the purposes of the evaluation.
• In the process of evaluation, infants’ and toddlers’ gains over a period of time are emphasized.
• The results of the evaluation are shared with others in the program.

Planning Evaluation for Improvement

Planning involves thinking ahead about what you want to do and how you will do it. When planning for the purpose of evaluating your practices, you need to be thoughtful about the purpose of your evaluation. Being clear about the purpose of your evaluation will help drive the types of information you gather, the questions you ask, the way you time your gathering of information, and the individuals that will be involved in the process. Ultimately, the information you collect will enable you to make decisions about things that you are doing well and things that need to be changed or improved.

For example, you may want to get feedback about how materials are used in your classroom, how experiences and activities involve and engage the children in your classroom, how routines and events are carried out, or whether families in your classroom feel welcome or not. You should work with your T&CS or administrator, as their support will be invaluable throughout this process. They can help you identify and clarify aspects of your practice that you may want to improve, make a plan to collect the information you need, and then use that information to improve your practices with children and families. Your T&CS or administrator can help you select the best ways to gather accurate information relevant to your question, and help you analyze that information to determine appropriate next steps. For example, if you are interested in understanding whether families feel welcomed in your classroom, your T&CS might suggest a small anonymous family survey, with well-crafted questions, and may make a detailed observation of how families interact with you while dropping off or picking up their child. You can then review this information together and see what aspects of your practice are working well and identify strategies in areas that are needing improvement.

Striving for Continuous Quality Improvement

You should work with your T&CS and administrator to improve your daily work with infants, toddlers, and families in your care. You should also collaborate with these program leaders to assist with any activities that are related to your program’s quality improvement. Caregivers who are committed to consciously improving services to children, youth, and families should demonstrate an openness to learning new knowledge and skills.

Continuous quality improvement entails:

• A commitment to lifelong learning
• Classroom and program changes that result in better quality caregiving
• Self-reflection about daily practices with infants, toddlers, and families
• Shared leadership
• Collaboration with fellow providers and program administration

With the leadership of your T&CS and administrator, you should strive for high-quality services and continuous improvement. Excellence within yourself contributes to your program’s success and growth.

See

Do

In your daily work with infants and toddlers, you can do the following when it comes to using information to evaluate your own practices and ultimately your program:

• Identify the good things and the not-so-good things that happen in your classroom each day. For example, you may notice that there may not be enough books available for the group of toddlers in your classroom to be engaged in the book area.
• Be purposeful and intentional when designing experiences and choosing materials for the children in your care. Be flexible and willing to make changes in your environment, materials, or routines, based on what you learn or observe about each infant or toddler. 
• It’s important to know whether families of the children in your classroom feel welcome and supported. You can use your program’s or curriculum’s goals as a way to know whether you are doing well when it comes to working with families and then make changes if needed.
• Use your program’s goals as a component of program evaluation. Your program goals should drive your planning of experiences and activities. You should also keep these goals in mind when determining whether children are developing and progressing.