Date: Thursday, December 18, 2025
Hi, I’m Elyse Fuerst, LMSW, an Evaluation Associate at CCNY, Inc. I recently co-led a project working with a program that implements social-emotional learning into schools and child care centers. The program uses a framework that helps early childhood educators strengthen the quality of their everyday interactions.
When this program set out to evaluate the framework, the coaches expressed initial hesitation. Evaluation can sometimes feel deficit-based, focused on what’s missing rather than what’s working. Our challenge was to design evaluation tools that met the program’s data needs and also felt supportive and empowering to those implementing the program.
To meet that challenge, we used a utilization-focused evaluation framework, which emphasizes that the success of an evaluation depends on how it will be used and by whom. We worked collaboratively with coaches and program leadership to ensure the tools reflected everyone’s needs and perspectives. Teacher voices were captured indirectly through the coaches who work closely with them and could share insights about classroom practices and experiences.
Through iterative feedback cycles, we tested and refined drafts of the tools with users. Coaches shared how the tools fit into their routines and helped identify language that felt strengths-based. Leadership clarified what data would be most meaningful for program advocacy and improvement. These conversations weren’t always easy—especially for those who had experienced evaluation as punitive, but they were essential. The process helped everyone get on the same page about why the data mattered and how it would be used.
The final evaluation is now being used by teachers, coaches, and program leadership. We aligned these new framework tools with existing evaluation tools, ensuring streamlined implementation. It provides practical, strengths-based guidance for classroom reflection and generates meaningful data that supports program growth. Perhaps most importantly, the co-creation process fostered trust and a shared sense of ownership among all roles involved.
One of the hottest tips from this project was the importance of centering usability from the very beginning. We quickly realized that even the most thoughtfully designed evaluation tools can fall flat if they don’t fit naturally into teachers’ and coaches’ daily routines. By involving teacher, coach, and program leadership voices early and often, we ensured that the tools were not just theoretically sound but genuinely practical and approachable.
Another hot tip is that acknowledging evaluation fatigue and skepticism is critical. Many teachers and coaches had experienced evaluation in ways that felt punitive or deficit-focused, which naturally created some anxiety about the process. Instead of glossing over those feelings, we openly discussed them and made them part of the design conversation. This acknowledgment helped transform evaluation from something “done to” educators into something “built with” them, a collaborative process that fostered trust and engagement.
This project reinforced that utilization-focused evaluation is more than a framework; it’s a mindset. Continuously aligning the needs of teachers, coaches, and leadership allowed us to create tools that served multiple purposes: it supported classroom reflection, captured meaningful data for program advocacy, and strengthened relationships across the program’s community.
We also learned that teacher voices can be effectively captured through coaches, who work closely with them day-to-day. Coaches provided nuanced insights about classroom practices and experiences, ensuring that the tools reflected what was truly happening in the field without overburdening teachers with additional data collection responsibilities.
When evaluation is approached with intentionality, collaboration, and empathy, it doesn’t just generate data; it generates engagement, trust, and actionable growth.
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