GSNE TIG Week: Guiding New Evaluation Students: See One, Do One, Teach One by Christopher Hall

Date: Monday, July 27, 2026

I’m Christopher Hall, an Assistant Professor of Human Services Delivery & Administration at the University of North Georgia. I am proud to guide students to learn foundational applications of evaluation within human services settings.

There’s a moment in learning about evaluation where students begin to understand that all human beings evaluate things constantly, and then recognize how complicated it can be to get professional, mindfully-designed evaluations.

The various career pathways in human services are vast, but the need to continually use evaluation for growth, learning, and improvement are critical for quality improvement.

Hot Tips:

While my professional training in evaluation was through the lens of educational research methodologies, I have heavily leaned on a method of training used for physicians in medical residency programs learned from my emergency medicine physician partner. The premise is that to become an expert, you need to:

• SEE ONE: Witnessing someone who is an expert completing a task may involve a direct practice, an educational lesson, a discussion, or a combination of experiential observation, explanation, or hands-on training. I tend to do this by demonstrating a skill like a logic model using step-by-step examples in a human services program context.
• DO ONE: Gaining the ability to directly practice that skill with supervision involves a learning curve the first time you try it, so learning through feedback, support, and making mistakes are all important parts of this process. Students have the chance to choose a local human services agency and learn how they operate, then in turn come up with a logic model that outlines this process. This often leads to mistakes, misunderstandings, and vague details that present opportunities to provide feedback and guidance.
• TEACH ONE: An individual has to practice something enough to where they can have confidence and ability to teach someone else that skill. This is also the point of greatest potential for learning, as when you teach others you discover more nuances through the questions asked, the mistakes made, and the corrections and feedback offered. Usually, a final presentation of a logic model that has incorporated feedback from me (as an expert) leads to the opportunity to teach other students what they learned, and how a logic model functions to outline a human services agency – an important skill to learn as a human services worker!

In evaluation, ungrading strategies in teaching, where the purpose is not to find fault but rather to offer guidance and support toward greater achievement of quality in use of a skill is more effective in students gaining competency. This tends to lead to a process of “grading” that is more akin to a work-based practice. When students practice a skill, they are given a percentage score that rates the completion of the task, not a judgment on an A-F scale. This means that I offer feedback to improve work, add specificity and detail, improve mistakes, add clarity, and generally learn how to elevate quality.

Being a new evaluator is challenging, as evaluation can be a seemingly infinite array of methods, skills, organizational strategies, approaches, and theories. If experienced evaluators work to train newcomers with care, guidance, and support, the future of evaluation has the opportunity to improve in quality and mindful care.

Rad Resources:

• Ayub (2022) describes the “See One, Do One, Teach One” guidance used within medical contexts.
• Intellectual humility, as a component of providing guidance and the importance of learning through mistakes, is well discussed by Battistone, et al. (2026).
• My favorite resource for teaching Logic Models in a structured and logical fashion is through the work of Shakman & Rodriguez (2015).

AEA is hosting GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.