Jane Fields image

Jane has more than two decades of experience working with project leaders, staff members, participants, and communities in evaluating program designs, implementation, and impact as both an internal and external evaluator. She has worked with organizations to help them, for example, design logic models, surveys, and ongoing data collection systems in order for them to build their evaluation capacity. Her work evaluating professional development programs designed for adult learners is directly applicable to her role as Evaluation and Credentialing Supervisor. In this role, she will be developing systems to evaluate the work of the Academy and working with stakeholders throughout the state on a credentialing system for child welfare workers and supervisors.

  1. What is your job title, and what will you be doing? I am the new Evaluation and Credentialing Supervisor at the Academy. In this role, I will be developing systems to evaluate the work we do at the Academy and working with stakeholders throughout the state to develop a credentialing system for child welfare workers and supervisors. There are many questions we want to try to answer through this work, such as: To what extent (1) are we meeting the training needs of child welfare workers and supervisors? (2) are we offering training that is of interest and is useful to our trainees? (3) do our Academy trainers feel prepared to deliver the curriculum? and (4) does the adoption of a credentialing system contribute to improved job satisfaction and retention of child welfare workers? Another key component of the Evaluation and Credentialing Unit will be determining the best ways to share the information that we gather so that it can be useful at the individual trainee level and useful for the county agencies, the Department of Human Services, the Academy, and so forth.
  2. Tell us about your education and/or work experience prior to joining the MNCWTA. I was most recently at the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI), which is part of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities (UMTC). Prior to joining CAREI, I worked in the Research, Evaluation, and Assessment Department at Minneapolis Public Schools and before that at the Institute on Community Integration (ICI) at the UMTC. I earned my PhD in Educational Policy and Administration, with an emphasis in Evaluation Studies, from the UMTC.
  3. How long have you been working in your field? I have been working as an evaluator for over 20 years.
  4. What do you wish you were good at? Perhaps I am not alone in this feeling, but there are several things I wish I were good at, or at least better at, doing. For example, I would love to be better at cooking – to be more efficient in the kitchen in terms of time management and organization, as well as better at knowing how to throw seemingly random ingredients together to make a wonderful dish. I also wouldn’t mind being a better singer – I still enjoy singing along to songs, but I’m not sure anyone else likes to hear me do that.
  5. What do you like to do outside of work? When I am not working, I enjoy playing (and watching) tennis, reading books, playing card games, going for walks with my family and dog, camping, and spending time with my extended family and friends.