Abstract Information: This is a practical workshop for practitioners in the humanitarian and development programs, who want to strengthen their programs’ and organization’s ability to pause, reflect, and tell the story of the change they achieve by using the monitoring, evaluation, research and context data. The workshop is based on the “Food for Thought: Pause and Reflection toolkit for emergency food security programs”, and will cover the steps involved to organize, implement, and conclude a pause and reflection process. The workshop participants will go through a simulation of applying the various tools in the toolkit, have discussions around the types of questions appropriate for pause and reflection, and practice applying the tools in the toolkit that helps bring the story of the program through lessons learned and learning briefs. It will discuss the importance of designing a clear program timeline, organizing discussions around program Strengths, Opportunities for Improvement based not only on weaknesses but also successes, Aspirations and Results, and conclude with a clear pathway of bringing the story together, through learning briefs. Pause and Reflection, as well as integrating collaboration, learning and adaptation, are becoming more prominent mechanisms for learning, required not only by the donors, but by internal agency policies for many development agencies. This toolkit will provide a clear guidance on what works in pause and reflection, discuss cultural elements of learning to pause and reflect, and bring together the various ways data and program evidence can be organized to elaborate on the program’s story of change not only for participants, but also for its own learning and growth.
Relevance Statement: Pause and Reflection is an important part of evaluation and learning. Very often programs embark on an evaluation journey without giving the program teams a chance to consolidate their learning, and collectively review their progress towards the intended outcomes, or have space to reflect on what the story of change is that they created or were part of. This is why in many evaluations, the evaluators struggle to access important datasets, and are often unable to capture the full extend of the experience or change. This workshop will enable many Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning team members of various development and emergency programs, as well as program managers to understand the importance of pause and reflection prior to program evaluation, and acquire skills that they can integrate and routinely apply to promote evaluative thinking among their teams, and build the story of change promoted by their programs over time, utilizing the evidence and data generated through routine monitoring, evaluation and learning. The workshop will be based on Food For Thought, Pause and Reflection Toolkit, recently launched by the Food Security Network, developed by Mercy Corps. https://www.fsnnetwork.org/resource/food-thought-pause-reflect-toolkit It will walk the participants through the process of applying the toolkit, using the various facilitator aids, and practice story telling by using program data through a simulated activity. Evaluators, who participate in the workshop can use this methodology to strengthen program evaluations, since it provides a helpful strategy on how to tap into the program team members’ knowledge and wealth of experience through a pause and reflection method, and enhance participatory methods in evaluation. Similar methods can also be used for program participants, partners and other program constituencies as needed. Pause and reflection, especially for humanitarian programs is not yet widely implemented and extremely important since a lot of valuable data and knowledge is lost with early departures of staff and early conclusions of the programs. Evaluations in this area, particularly, struggle with sensemaking of the data, and/or drawing reasonable conclusions that are context bound and meaningfully capture the change of the program. This workshop will help address a critical methodological gap in the evaluation of humanitarian programs.
Learning Objectives:
Upon completion of the Pause and Reflection workshop the participants will be able to plan, implement pause and reflection workshops for their own programs.
Upon completion of the Pause and Reflection workshop the participants will be able to modify their MEL systems for better storytelling and periodic reflections.
Upon completion the participants will be able to organize, implement and document stories of change within humanitarian and development programs, utilizing program monitoring evaluation and research data and evidence.
