Cultivating Equity-Driven Teaching Partnerships: A Case Study of Developmental Evaluation in an Urban Teacher Residency Program

There is a dearth of literature on the potential of evaluation in teacher education for program learning. Integrated, timely, and use-oriented evaluation processes are needed in order to improve programmatic decision-making and support the development of high quality teachers. At the same time, the emergence of developmental evaluation (DE) offers a critical space for teacher educators to think proactively about the educative value of evaluation, as it can facilitate program learning while simultaneously adding to the research base for promising practices in teacher education. This study’s empirical contribution to the literature on DE supports Patton’s (2011) contention that it constitutes an evaluation approach qualitatively different from formative and summative evaluation.Drawing upon complexity science concepts and evaluation use theory, DE is “an effort to use elements of systematic evaluative inquiry in ways that support the efforts of program personnel whose work is situated in these less conventional planning and implementation contexts” (Lam & Shulha, 2015, p. 2). This case study explores the extent to which a DE effort informed how a social justice-focused teacher education program attempted to cultivate equity-driven relationships between preservice teachers and their experienced placement teachers, thereby highlighting potential benefits and challenges of the DE process. As such, the study addresses the following questions: What was the nature and extent of evaluation use that resulted from an Urban Teacher Residency’s developmental evaluation process? What factors promoted and/or inhibited use in this program context? Applying the lens of evaluation use theory, this research identifies nuanced and overlapping forms of use evident from analysis of case study data. I argue that the interactive nature of reacting to, interpreting, and questioning data among colleagues inherent in the DE approach demonstrates the constructive potential of goals-aligned facilitation for responsive evaluation practice that supports program development in teacher education. After describing the forms of evaluation use detected, I consider factors that encouraged and inhibited use, paying particular attention to the credibility-dependent, facilitation-centered role of the developmental evaluator and to the challenges inherent in this evaluation context