Evaluating your practice
This toolkit provides a wide range of resources, guidance and tools to help you embed collaborative, evidence-based decision making into your practice and to evaluate your teaching across varying levels of impact. The toolkit includes:
- information and guidance about the University's approach to evaluation
- guidance and resources to help you evaluate your own practice
- advice and guidance on how to embed the Student Voice into your evaluation practices
- examples of different evaluation methods you can use and real case study examples
- information about the University's Evaluation Advocates Network including how to get involved.
Our evaluation principles
To help facilitate consistent evaluation practices across the University, this toolkit and our approach to evaluation has been built on five key principles (inspired by the Evaluation Collective manifesto). These principles are:
- Evaluation for learning: evaluation should help our students and staff to develop
- Enables informed decision-making: evaluation should provide the data and information to inform decision-making at all levels of the University
- Embedded and sustainable: evaluation should be embedded into practice, focussed and consistent
- Strategically aligned: evaluation should be aligned to university strategies at the high-level and be enriched by perspectives and insight from all levels of the organisation
- Creative and participatory: evaluation should be innovative and should include the Student Voice
This introductory video explains in more detail why evaluation is important, how effective evaluation contributes to continued enhancement of the Student Experience as well as our own practice, and the University's five evaluation principles.
Guidance and resources
Guides and templates to help you design, plan and deliver your evaluation
Read more
Evaluation methods
Guidance and tools to help you choose your evaluation methods and approaches
Read more
Students as evaluation partners
Guidance and resources to help you embed the Student Voice into your evaluation practices
Read more
Evaluation Advocate Network
The Evaluation Advocates Network brings people from across the University together to share good practice in evaluation, lessons learnt and findings, and to join events
Join the Evaluation Advocates Network Teams Channel
Workshops
To help you develop you to design, plan and deliver your evaluation effectively or to develop your Theory of Change, you can sign-up for either one-to-one consultation sessions or a group workshop introducing Theory of Change.
Evaluation support sessions
These 30-minute, one-to-one support sessions help you to develop your evaluation plan. During the session, you will be given templates and case studies to help you plan effectively and sustainably and will gain insights from lessons learned based on the experiences of colleagues across the University.
Theory of Change consultation
A one-hour, one-to-one, introductory session designed to help you understand the basics of Theory of Change. This session will focus on addressing your evaluation needs. You will be guided on how to apply the Theory of Change framework, and provided with links to resources and case studies to help you plan, design and complete your evaluation effectively. You will also gain insights from lessons learned, curated by the Evaluation Advocates Network, based on the experiences of colleagues across the University.
Extended Theory of Change workshop
This comprehensive, two-hour workshop provides in-depth guidance and support to help you create and implement a Theory of Change for your project, practice, or programme.
To request this session, please email the Teaching Excellence team.
Evaluation support session (Access and Success focussed)
If your evaluation is linked to Access and Success or the Access and Participation Plan, this 30-minute, one-to-one session will help you to develop your evaluation plan. You will be given templates and case studies to help you plan effectively and sustainably and will gain insights from lessons learned, curated by the Evaluation Advocates Network, based on the experiences of colleagues across the University.
Acknowledgements
This toolkit was developed by Fran Hooley (Evaluation and Impact Project Lead) in partnership with Haadia Bahemia (Student Partner), Jack Walker (Student Data, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Access and Success) and the Teaching Excellence team (Institute of Teaching and Learning).