Podcast Archives - Glass Frog Solutions

We are excited to be kicking off Season 4 of the Glass Frog Podcast with evaluator and author Chari Smith! Chari is the founder of Evaluation into Action, which partners with nonprofit professionals to create realistic and meaningful program evaluation processes. She teaches workshops aimed at helping nonprofit professionals understand the value of program evaluation, […] The post Making Evaluation Simple with Chari Smith appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

Welcome to the final episode of Season 3 of The Glass Frog Podcast! This episode we got to talk with evaluator, consultant, cartoonist, and all around nice guy Chris Lysy. We’ve been following Chris on and off for a few years now through his blog. He recently published a book of evaluation-themed cartoons, Evaluation Illustrated, […] The post Season 3 Finale with Chris Lysy appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

In this episode, Jen and Rebecca continue their discussion about their project on the study of the ancillary benefits of education programs. (If you haven’t seen the first part of this episode, you can check it out here. It will get you up to speed on the project and the teacher residency part of the […] The post Jen and Rebecca talk about auxiliary staffing programs appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

In this episode, Jen and Rebecca talk for the first time about one of their own projects: a study of the ancillary benefits of education programs. That may sound wonky, so let us explain. All nonprofit education programs have primary goals — some aim to help teachers in the classroom, some train teachers, some provide […] The post Jen and Rebecca talk about teacher residency programs appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

We had a chance to talk with Teresa McCaffrey of the Educational Partnership Center (EPC) at University of California, Santa Cruz this month. EPC oversees a collection of 10 programs aimed at preparing underrepresented students for college. Altogether, they serve 11,000 students in the Santa Cruz region. Though each program has a different goal, EPC […] The post Collective Impact Models with Teresa McCaffrey appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

This month, we talk with Kathy Haynie, Director of Haynie Research and Evaluation, about evaluating STEM education programs. Kathy has worked in the STEM evaluation field for almost 20 years and was gracious enough to let us pick her brain on her background and approach to evaluation, as well as what she (and the field […] The post Evaluating STEM Education Programs with Kathy Haynie appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

This episode, we are excited to bring you the wisdom of Madhawa “Mads” Palihapitiya. Originally from Sri Lanka, Mads currently teaches at University of Massachusetts – Boston and is an expert in conflict resolution and violence prevention, which he came to study as a result of growing up during Sri Lanka’s Civil War. Mads eventually began working as an evaluator in communities around Boston, which is when he started integrating photography into his evaluation work. Jen came across Mads’...

Welcome to Season 3! We're kicking off our season by talking with Stefanie Singer, who is the Program Director for Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE), a New York City-based program operated by Urban Arts Partnership. EASE is an arts integration program that trains teachers on how to use simple arts integration activities and methods to improve outcomes for elementary-aged students. The program was designed to serve special education students, but as we discuss in the interview, the...

The Glass Frog Podcast is back for its third season! Amidst the chaos and heartbreak of 2020, we're hoping that the podcast can offer our listeners not just a chance to learn something new, but a brief, monthly respite from all of the disorder. We're really glad you're joining us. Our first episode of the season drops on Monday, July 6. We're kicking off the season by talking to Stefanie Singer, who manages a program called Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE) at Urban Arts...

Surprise! You (and we) thought we had finished up season 2, but then we had an opportunity to talk with some folks about an issue we think and care a lot about and we couldn't pass it up. Welcome to our bonus episode on cultivating interpersonal effectiveness (in the classroom and beyond). This season we talked (and learned) a lot about how to be better, more empathetic listeners, how to apply those skills as we help organizations build learning cultures, and how our academic colleagues are...

Welcome back! This month, we conclude Season 2 by talking with our old friend and colleague, Pau Aragay Marín. Pau is Director of Impact and Organizational Improvement at Educo. Educo is a global NGO that acts in defense of children, ensuring they are living humanely, particularly in the wake of natural and man-made disasters, and that their rights are protected. He oversees a team that is helping to set the strategy for their global impact and putting the systems in place to collect the...

Welcome back! This may surprise you, but, despite our girlish good looks and youthful dispositions, we aren't spring chickens. It's been a while since we were in school and we're a little out of touch with what young people are learning these days. Since today's students are tomorrow's professionals, we wanted to learn more about how our colleges and universities are training students to be evaluators. To do so, we invited a panel of evaluation professors to tell us all about their...

We talk this month with Andrew Taylor and Ben Liadsky of Taylor Newberry Consulting, a program evaluation firm just outside of Toronto, Canada. Andrew and Ben chat with us about building a learning culture -- what it means and how foundations can help support their grantees in this effort. This discussion reminded us a lot of our conversation with Sammy and Scott from Arbor Brothers in the sense that it reminded us of all the ways in which funders can lead the way for promoting healthy...

This month we had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Kerry Anne McGeary at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Kerry Anne is an economist who transitioned from a more traditional academic research role into the role of program officer at the Foundation. She is great to chat with -- she is smart but sensible; she is a skilled and experienced researcher but knows how to get things done in the real world; and she cares about her work and its impact! We pick Kerry Anne's brain about how to measure...

This week, Jen and Rebecca chat about the role that empathy can play in program evaluation. This chat was inspired by a workshop the Glass Frog team held internally a few months ago to discuss what empathy is, its importance for our work, and how we can become more empathetic as evaluators, consultants, and colleagues. We enjoyed that workshop and felt like it helped our team talk through some of the ways in which we are not always as empathetic as we could be. Having this conversation...

Welcome back! This month we had the pleasure of talking with Kyrah Brown and Susan Wolfe about evaluating community collaboratives. We define what collaboratives are, Susan and Kyrah's approach to evaluating them, and some of the fun and challenging aspects of working with collaboratives. Kyrah and Susan are both trained as community psychologists, so they approach all of their work from that perspective. We learned a lot and we think you will, too, so give it a listen! If you are...

We are thrilled to be back for our second season of the Glass Frog podcast! If you're new to the podcast, we started it as a way of both connecting with people who were doing interesting work and learning about new topics related to measurement and evaluation. Season 1 was a lot of fun and we're looking forward to doing it all over again in season 2! In the coming weeks, we'll talk about evaluating community collaboratives, health evaluation, the role of empathy in evaluation, and many more...

Last month, we talked with Justin Rivers of The Character Connection Initiative and he shared with us a story about a survey his organization undertook in order to measure growth on student outcomes. You can listen to that episode to hear some of the things that went well and not-so-well, but one of our takeaways from that episode is how hard it is to do surveys well! In our work, we're constantly butting up against problems with how to design good questions, how to tailor surveys to the...

Did you know that almost two-thirds of reporting public charities in the U.S. have an annual budget that is less than $500,000? (We learned that from Social Startup Success.) There are a lot of small organizations out there and it's tough to do evaluation when you're a one or two (wo)man show. In this episode, we chat with Justin Rivers, founder of The Character Connection Initiative (TCCI), a character education program serving the NYC region. Justin is a former middle school teacher and...

In this episode, we chat with fellow evaluator Kylie Hutchinson about her new book Evaluation Failures: 22 Tales of Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned, which was released in September. Kylie is the principal consultant and founder of Community Solutions, a planning and evaluation firm in British Columbia. She chats with us about her reasons for writing the book, the importance of learning from our failures, and her own experiences as a professional evaluator. Also, spoiler alert: Kylie...