Breakfast Club Blog
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is a curated space where bloggers from around the world contribute content on a continual basis about a variety of topics relevant to in and out-of-school time. The BOOST Breakfast Club blog is at the heart of an ongoing dialogue where expanded learning and education professionals share their personal thoughts and stories from the in and out-of-school time field. They also tell us what they ate for breakfast!
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is Brain Food for In and Out-of-School Time Leaders!
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Incorporating Equity into Evaluation: Tools to Use
For many out-of-school time professionals, evaluation feels separate from the heart of the program. Data collection is an administrative chore like refilling paper in the copier: necessary, but not all that meaningful. This is, in part, because data and evaluation are often described as value-neutral, which doesn’t connect very well with people and programs who are values-driven. Who wants to put time and effort into something that isn’t aligned with your purpose? By acknowledging that values in...Read More
You Shouldn’t Play With Your Food, But You Should Play With Your Data!
I’ve worked with many expanded learning programs in many settings over the years, making me one of the luckier researchers out there. Too often, though, I see program staff dedicating a lot of time and effort to collecting data, and almost none to learning from it. What a bummer. One reason why data goes in, but doesn’t come back out, is because teams have too few experiences with exploratory, low stakes, playful explorations of their data. Instead, data is used in a last-minute rush to get the ...Read More
Turn Your Survey Hell into Survey Heaven in Three Easy Steps
Nearly all after-school and summer programs have their kids take surveys, and nearly all programs suffer through the process. Surveys so rarely live up to their promise, and it gets harder and harder to convince staff and youth to complete this annual chore. In my experience as a professional evaluator, surveys almost always have three big flaws that limit their usefulness. Fix these flaws to turn survey hell to survey heaven! Step One: Organize survey questions by theme Think of the three or fo...Read More