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Given that my mother was a third grade teacher
and my father a school administrator, I’ve long felt at home in
schools. As an adult, I became a practitioner in my own right as
a middle high school teacher in upstate New York. After earning
my Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at Cornell, I moved to
New Orleans, where I ran the secondary teacher education program
at Tulane University. In 1989 I moved upriver to the University
of Minnesota as the founding director of the
Center for
Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI), a
collaborative research organization. I worked closely with
school superintendents as part of my work with CAREI. I also
helped coordinate a professional practice site in Minneapolis
for a number of years.
For twenty-five years I have studied educational
practice, consistently focusing on evaluation use and the
mechanisms of school change. Increasingly, my research concerns
the role that the systematic use of data by practitioners plays
in effecting and documenting change, both in schools and in
other organizations. Since moving to Minnesota, my primary
research emphasis has remained in program evaluation, with
special interest in the areas of action research, participatory
evaluation, evaluation capacity building, and evaluator
competencies.
Given my grounding in the world of schools, my
research has addressed two broad topics: (1) studying
educational and evaluation practice in school settings,
especially during school reform and change efforts, and (2) the
role and function of program evaluation in school districts and
other organizations, including the use of both the evaluation
process and its results. The ultimate goal of my work as it has
evolved in the past few years is to determine how to foster and
support evaluation processes by whatever name in educational and
social service organizations over time. The terms I use to
describe what I study have evolved, from action research and
process evaluation, to participatory or collaborative evaluation
(where evaluators work with program staff and participants), and
finally to evaluation capacity building (purposeful efforts to
build evaluation infrastructure and skills into an organization,
also known as organizational learning). Since 1998 when I
introduced the phrase in a speech, I often refer to my focus as
“free range evaluation” – a collaborative evaluation process
that lives freely in the world, that is more viable when it
survives (and it often does not) because it lives in a natural
setting and reproduces itself in its organizational context.
Free range evaluation is longitudinal, and it focuses on
building the capacity of individuals and organizations to
sustain evaluation activities.
From 1999-2001, I was fortunate to take a leave
from my professorial role and serve as an internal
evaluator/coordinator of research and evaluation in
Anoka-Hennepin ISD #11. The district is Garrison Keillor’s alma
mater, and its children and the professional staff truly are
above average. I learned once again that it is far easier to
talk about educational change than to make it happen. While at
Anoka, I had the opportunity to work on a number of
participatory evaluations, including a special education project
with a 50-member study committee.
Currently, I’m co-authoring a book on
interpersonal evaluation practice, applying theory-based
principles to program evaluation and recording what I’ve learned
in more than a quarter century of evaluation experience. As an
evaluator who spends a lot of time in the college classroom, I’m
constantly bridging the worlds of theory and practice. When I
appear at conferences and meetings, however, I always ask to be
introduced as a teacher - because first and foremost, I love to
teach.
Academic degrees
- Ph.D., Cornell University 1979, curriculum and
instruction
- M.S., Cornell University 1978, curriculum and
instruction
- A.B., Cornell University 1971, English
Areas of current research interest
- Interactive evaluation practice
- Participatory approaches to program evaluation
- Action research and school change
Selected publications
Stevahn, L., & King, J.A. (In progress).
Using needs assessment to improve programs. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage Publications.
King, J.A., & Stevahn, L. (In progress, to
be published, 2006). Interactive evaluation practice:
Managing the interpersonal dynamics of program evaluation.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Stevahn, L., & King, J.A. (In press).
Managing conflict constructively in program evaluation.
Evaluation.
Stevahn, L., King, J.A., Ghere, G., &
Minnema, J. (In press). Using evaluator competencies in
university-based evaluation programs. Canadian Journal of
Program Evaluation.
King, J.A., Stevahn, L., Ghere, G., &
Minnema, J. (2001). Toward a taxonomy of essential evaluator
competencies. American Journal of Evaluation, 22(2),
229-247.
Dr. King's curriculum vitae [.pdf]
Revised September 2005
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