It’s the end of the school year! How is your garden program doing? Is it living up to the expectations of both the students and the teachers in your program? Are you teaching everything you set out to teach? One way to find out is to allow teachers and students to self-evaluate their time in the garden. To help you out, we’ve put up an example of our Teacher End of the Year Evaluation and our Student Pre and Post Test that we use with 2nd and 3rd graders. We encourage you to use them as springboards to make your own tools.
If you are looking for a less writing-based evaluation tool, you can always take video of students answering your evaluation questions verbally. It’s also possible to use an outside evaluator to observe your program and rate it using any number of different tools. This tool can help you understand more about evaluation for environmental programs, and walks you through the process of creating a plan for your own program.