Thomas Archibald, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education at Virginia Tech. His practice and research are focused primarily on program evaluation and evaluation capacity building. He serves as the Chief of Party/Director of the Feed the Future Senegal Youth in Agriculture project, funded by USAID/Senegal, which is increasing youth engagement in Senegal’s economic growth.
Tom is also an Associate Editor for Evaluation and Program Planning, Editorial Board Member of New Directions for Evaluation, Editorial Board Member of the American Journal of Evaluation, Board Member of the Eastern Evaluation Research Society (EERS), and Program Co-Chair of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Organizational Learning and Evaluation Capacity Building Topical Interest Group.
We discuss the following areas:
– Evaluative thinking and how it relates to evaluation capacity building
– How valuing is an essential part of evaluative thinking
– What evaluation can teach other organizations not traditionally served by evaluation and what evaluators we can learn from them
– Specific steps for evaluators to become more reflective in their practice
– The importance of evaluative thinking, critical thinking, practical wisdom, reflective practice, intuition, and mindfulness
– Social science theories that
– How theories of power and an understanding power dynamics can inform evaluation
– How the study of evaluative thinking and evaluation can assist individuals in a broad range of disciplines
– Can evaluation save the world or does it at least have a role in improving it?
– The future of evaluation: new and emerging approaches
– Books that Tom highly recommends
You can connect with Tom on LinkedIn or @tgarchibald on Twitter.
Enjoy!