BELIEVE in collaboration: Effective evaluation partnerships for National Professional Development projects

Abstract

Quality partnerships are imperative for successful project implementation. The partnership between project personnel and independent evaluators is often overlooked. In effective partnerships, both the evaluators and the education project management team collectively ensure that educational initiatives are well‐planned, executed, and assessed. This collaborative approach fosters a culture of continuous improvement and accountability, ultimately leading to better educational outcomes for English learner students, educators, and the community. This conceptual article highlights eight elements of an effective project management and evaluator partnership: (1) clear communication and collaboration, (2) goal alignment, (3) early planning for evaluation, (4) multi‐purpose evaluation activities, (5) shared responsibility, (6) feedback loops, (7) transparency, and (8) evaluation capacity building. The authors present these elements through the design, deployment, analysis, and use of the Better English Learners Instruction and Education in Varied Environments (BELIEVE) classroom observation tool. The tool was collaboratively created and deployed across two National Professional Development grants in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, addressing the need for a tool that could be used in varying learning modes and capture how effectively classroom teachers were teaching academic content and literacy to English learners in elementary and middle schools. The article illustrates how this tool has been used by program personnel to inform the teacher–coach relationship and educate teachers and administrators about best practices, and by the evaluation team to assess the progress of teachers' use of research‐based practices to teach English learners.