Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello, we’re Goldie MacDonald, Omoshalewa Bamkole, Lea Theodorou, Fardin Rahman, Midjina Richard, and Stephanie Johnson from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, and Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. We are practicing evaluators focused on public health activities in the US. We created a professional development activity focused on reflective practice (RP) and plain language writing capabilities. Although we’re at different career stages (i.e., early, mid-career, and closer to retirement), we share a genuine interest in RP: learning through self-awareness and introspective thinking to support professional development (University of Cambridge).RP can aid individuals to meaningfully explore and critique their experiences and actions to improve evaluative work (Canadian Evaluation Society). We wanted to regularly connect with other evaluators to engage in RP as we developed posts for this blog. In short, we collaborated to:
From July 2024 to January 2025, we completed four virtual meetings; asynchronous work in roughly 20 draft versions of posts; 11 virtual meetings with a plain language instructor and editor, Leslie O’Flavahan; and review internal to CDC for public-facing content. Throughout the process, we gently pushed each other to probe deeper into how we work. For example, colleagues asked why one of us focused on a topic, how a topic directly related to lived experience, or what feelings were associated with these experiences. We explored what can be learned via reflection and how these realizations can change work-related actions or decisions. These conversations encouraged us to identify patterns in ways we work (positive, neutral, and negative) and whether or how to adjust. Tovey and colleagues emphasized that a lot of meaning-making amid RP happens in group settings. In our case, we sparked unexpected learnings and real-time growth via a safe space to be candid and vulnerable about challenges in evaluation practice. Also, we discovered a common thread: we experience explicit and implicit cues to disentangle emotions or feelings from daily work, for better or worse. Yet, we identified genuine interplay among emotional, interpersonal, operational, and technical aspects of evaluative work. RP helped us to more fully understand our experiences and begin to translate learnings to tangible personal and professional growth. In coming months, look for five posts from us; each is an individual story about how RP was used to:
We demonstrate how RP unveiled connections between a range of interpersonal and personal experiences and actions in evaluative work. Ultimately, individual and group reflection enabled each of us to identify things we didn’t know we didn’t know. As we share our learnings, we hope posts spark dialogue in safe spaces in your workplaces.
TheUniversity of Cambridge Reflective Practice Toolkit defines and introduces RP, explores benefits and barriers to reflection, and methods to integrate reflection in professional activities and beyond.
Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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.