Sustaining a Community of Practice

Accordion Content

Your learning objectives are what grounds the structure and experience of your CoP. It is crucial to evaluate to what extent your community of practice is meeting your intended learning objectives, as your results will help inform how you might need to improve your programming. As you develop your evaluation strategy, begin by reviewing your learning objectives and consider how you might collect data related to each of your objectives.

The more information you gather about your community of practice, the better you will understand how and what youth serving professionals are learning in your community. Examples of useful data sources include:

• Brief feedback surveys. Develop a brief survey with 3-5 questions that participants can complete at the end of each session of your CoP. Draft questions that are relevant for every session, regardless of how the content or structure of sessions might shift over time. In this way, you have a consistent metric that is easy to compare across sessions. These questions can be multiple choice (e.g., “On a scale of 1-5, how relevant was today’s session for your professional learning?”) and open-ended (e.g., “What was the most valuable thing you learned today?”).

• Interviews and focus groups. While surveys can be a quick and convenient way to gather feedback, survey responses can sometimes lack nuance and depth. To account for this, consider conducting interviews or focus groups to foster a more open dialogue about what your participants are experiencing in the CoP and the extent to which it is supporting their learning and growth. You can use these conversations to dig deeper into findings from survey results and develop a clearer understanding of how to support youth serving professionals.
• Data that participants collect about their organizations’ performance. The organizations that are represented in your CoP might already be collecting data that is relevant to your learning objectives. This can yield valuable insight about whether or not this learning experience is impacting outcomes within these organizations. Talk with each of your participants to understand what types of data they collect in their organizations, and ask if you can establish a data sharing agreement with their organizations.

Communities of practice are most successful when participants are actively engaged over an extended period of time. Consider how long you expect participants to be involved in your community of practice and determine appropriate intervals for collecting different types of data. These intervals will likely be determined by your capacity to collect and analyze that data. For example, you may want to implement a brief feedback survey at the end of every session, as that information can be collected in a few minutes and analyzed over a few hours. On the other hand, interviews and focus groups require a lot more capacity to conduct and analyze; as such, you might only collect that type of data once or twice a year. In either case, being consistent in the timing of your data collection will improve your ability to analyze the data across time points.

You will want to analyze data at different levels of your CoP. When you analyze all of your data collectively, you can understand how well your CoP is going overall and identify strengths and growth opportunities in your curriculum and programming. When you examine the data that you have for specific individuals, you can identify personalized supports for participants who might be in different places in their professional learning journey.