Chapter 9: Assessing Facilitation Quality

What’s Inside This Chapter

In this chapter, you’ll learn:

• How to ask learners for feedback on facilitation quality

• The observation methods used to obtain feedback

• How to analyze performance on activities, tests, and assessments to obtain feedback

• About level 1 and 2 evaluations for facilitator feedback.

All facilitators want to know how they are doing. You are in the late afternoon of the first day of a two-day program. It is natural—and professional—to want to know how things are going. After all, it is your responsibility to make learning happen. So, is it happening? How can you find out?

Kirkpatrick (1994) indicates that there are four levels of evaluation. These are reaction (level 1), learning (level 2), behavior (level 3), and results (level 4). For facilitators, levels 1 and 2 provide feedback within the learning experience. Level 1 is a measure of learner satisfaction; that is, how participants react to their experience. Level 2 addresses whether learning took place. Was there a knowledge shift? As a result of the learning, did skills increase? Can the learner demonstrate the new behaviors in the learning experience? To provide this feedback, instruments are developed to solicit feedback and to assess if learning took place. These instruments are part of the design/development process. These aspects of evaluation as they relate to the facilitator are discussed later in this chapter.

Noted

Effective facilitators are less concerned about whether the learners are having a good time than about whether learning is happening. Fun does not equate learning or application to the job. Feedback should be sought to ensure that learning is always foremost, but the facilitator must keep in mind the limitations and strengths of the various ways of eliciting feedback from the learners.