ABSTRACT
At the end of a workshop the leader and the participants often engage in evaluative conversations. These are usually formative: they are concerned with general impressions, are unspecific and often concern the emotional tone of the experience. A variety of adjectives are used in such conversations - challenging, interesting, demanding, moving, disquieting, evocative, exhausting, instructive and surprising being amongst those heard at the end of one of the workshops on stress described earlier. Sometimes the leader may seek some more objective evaluation of the outcome of the workshop, a more summative evaluation. This may take the form of seeking to establish just what changes in attitudes, behaviours or emotions have occurred as a result of the workshop by means of interviewing, questionnaire, observation or some combination of these methods. In addition, the leader may seek to examine the quality of the workshop as a presentation so as to make changes to the format in the light of experience - Rhys has made specific reference to this in describing her health visitor workshops. These forms of evaluation are the concerns of this chapter. The aim is to examine the nature of changes that can be expected from workshops and to understand the ways in which such changes can be evaluated.
