At last week’s South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA) Biennial Conference, Khulisa evaluator Margie Roper chaired a session titled, “BRIDGE M&E Community of Practice (CoP): Actioning educational data: Have data, what next?”
Margie Roper (left) and Leticia Taimo (center) of Khulisa and Benita Williams (right) of Benita Williams Evaluation lead the BRIDGE M&E CoP session at SAMEA.
We’ll be posting more about BRIDGE and the M&E CoP in the future. But this post is about the fun twist on a question-and-answer (Q&A) that took place at the end of the BRIDGE session.
After each of the session speakers presented, there was a short, conventional Q&A for attendees with specific questions for the presenters. Then came another, more interactive Q&A: Khulisa staff posted a series of prompts on the wall, with partial questions and answers about educational data. The staff then handed out blank post-it notes and invited session participants to get out of their seats and submit both questions and answers in response to the prompts.
The session participants gathered around the wall of prompts, scribbling down questions and answers and chatting with one another about the CoP.
Question prompts.
Session attendees write down their questions and answers.
The first answer is posted: “CoPs are a lifeline.”
Completions of the question: “How long does it typically take to…”
This interactive Q&A was a great way to hear from session participants who might not raise their hands to ask questions otherwise. The exercise was also in line with the mission of the CoP, drawing on the collective expertise of those participating in the session: a “You-gle”, as Margie and Benita called it. And as this was a hybrid in-person/virtual CoP, the session’s virtual attendees participated in the Q&A using a whiteboard!
Khulisa evaluators are currently compiling the responses to this Q&A, and we’ll discuss the findings in a subsequent post.