Let me set the scene for you – early spring of 2025, a graduate student seeking a capstone project meets a client with big goals and no existing program evaluation. They agree to embark on a capstone project together, with the scope of work still largely undefined.
That graduate student was me, and the client was the wonderful Partnership Community of Practice at Cramp Elementary (PCoP), a project of the Philadelphia STEM Equity Collective (PSEC). For three years, the PCoP had been running a collaborative initiative designed to expand equitable access to high-quality, culturally relevant STEM education in a North Philadelphia community school. PCoP brings together multiple STEM partners to deliver coordinated, hands-on learning experiences across grade levels. The chairs of the PCoP knew that meaningful evaluation was key to both showing their impact and making the case for sustaining and growing their program.
In April 2025, the PCoP team and I participated in ImpactED’s Evaluation Planning Workshop Series. We split into two evaluation groups - one in which the chairs and I focused on the community of practice model itself, and another in which PCoP partners constructed an evaluation plan focused on measuring student and teacher outcomes.
Our group entered our first session with tons of ideas. At a surface level, we wanted to understand what was working and what wasn’t. What did partners actually find valuable? What challenges were they facing? Then we started to ask questions that dug a little deeper. Why had partners joined the PCoP in the first place? What were they hoping to gain from participating, and how did the project connect to the larger PSEC mission? And then there were the larger questions that kept emerging. Was the PCoP addressing gaps the school district had already identified? Could this model work beyond Cramp Elementary?
During our coaching sessions, we worked together to narrow our big ideas into a concrete evaluation plan. The sessions allowed us to focus our ideas, and our coach helped us turn our broad goals into specific questions. We wrapped up the workshop series with a tangible tool and plan for conducting the first program evaluation of the Partnership Community of Practice.
Over the next several months, that evaluation plan became my north star. The indicators, methods, and approach that we determined during the series became the basis of my graduate capstone project. It provided a framework that kept the evaluation focused on intended outcomes and ensured consistency across different stages of implementation. I returned to the guide throughout the project and leaned on it heavily as I surfaced findings.
The evaluation planning series set me up for success and showed me how powerful collaborative evaluation processes can be. One of the key findings from our evaluation was that collaborative projects had a positive impact on perceptions of collaboration, sense of belonging, and continued commitment to the work. One project that stood out to members of the PCoP was the ImpactED Workshop Series itself, with one member sharing:
“I think that process…we're kind of committed to it. It gave us a different lens to view our work, and that lens was specifically, we had to come together and cohesively talk about what we were doing, and measure its impact. And that really clarified a lot for me about the type of work we could be doing as individual cultural and STEM organizations: that there was a way forward for us to measure collective impact and to really overlay the type of work that we were doing in a meaningful way.”
Evaluation work is iterative, and what the workshop series gave us was the foundation to continue building and learning. For the PCoP, that means a clearer path to understanding and communicating their impact. For me, it means entering my career with the tools and confidence to do this work well. That's the thing about collaborative evaluation: it doesn't just measure work. It strengthens it.
