Evaluation Failures:22 Tales of Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned

Learning from Evaluation "Failures": Lessons from Evaluators, edited by Kylie Hutchinson is a candid collection of stories in which 22 seasoned evaluators share professional mistakes they have made in the past, and what they learned moving forward. The idea for this short book came about after Michael Quinn Patton (who provides a Foreword for the book) convened what turned out to be very popular panel sessions on this topic at the 2015, 2016, and 2017 American Evaluation Association conferences, which Kylie Hutchinson then replicated at the Canadian Evaluation Society. The book offers approachable stories in a conversational tone, making it an enjoyable as well as informative read. Each story offers applied universal lessons as takeaways, and reflective questions at the end of the chapter for readers to contemplate the lessons learned. The book will appeal to anyone working in the evaluation field, and also to instructors of program evaluation courses who want to bring the real world into their classroom.