In this assignment, you’ll begin outlining the criteria you think are important for a public engagement to work well. See the assignment handout for more details. I want you to imagine that you are a public engagement expert and an agency just hired you to evaluate their engagement. As an expert, you know what to look for to see if it is working and in this assignment, you’ll be telling me what you are looking for. I would highly recommend looking at the “Public Participation Methods” reading (although all of the readings in Week 3 will have ideas for you). Remember to make your criteria both specific enough to be observable and general enough to be applied to a wide variety of engagement methods. You want to be able to take these criteria into any engagement and have them be useful, but also you want to be able to actually observe whether or not the criteria is being met. I’ve given some examples of this in the handouts.
Assignment Handout —— At the end of Unit 5, you will be turning in a blank rubric and a brainstormed list that you will use to complete your rubric in in future assignments. Rubrics are a structured way of evaluating something — often they get used to evaluate student papers and projects, but they can be used to evaluate anything. In this course, you will be creating your own rubric to evaluate a community engagement. Their are two parts to this assignment: [1] Creating a rubric template and [2] Brainstorming your criteria.
Rubric Template
For this, you need to do some research into how to create a rubric. Google “how to create a rubric” and get some ideas from the results. Then, use the ‘insert grid’ function in a word document to insert a grid and fill in the first row with your chosen grading (for example, you may choose 3 levels titled “exceeds expectations, meets expectations, does not meet expectations”…or your may choose 5 levels, or you may choose to use ‘satisfactory’ instead of ‘expectations’ — it’s all up to you!).
Brainstorm your criteria
You need to brainstorm 8-10 criteria from the readings that you think are important for evaluation, but they must be observable. This means that “The activity engages the public” is too broad – it is too difficult to observe. Perhaps “Employed a strategy to engage diverse communities” would work – it allows you to “grade” an engagement on its use of a specific strategy. Important: Go back and look at the “Public Participation Methods” and “Stakeholder Participation” readings for ideas about which criteria to use. Do not copy them word for word. You must rephrase anything you find in the readings in your own words! In addition to your rubric with the first column completed, you need to write a short description (under 100 words) for each of the 8-10 criteria about why that criteria matters and how you think you will be able to observe it.
