In the early 1990s, Wayne Ross and I wrote an article with this title. (The full article is available here.) While we were talking about the role of personal experiences in learning to teach, rereading this article suggests a broader scope to the value of personal experiences in learning just about anything, including evaluation or research. Because evaluation is absolutely everywhere the opportunities to hone or knowledge and skills is limitless. I’ve had fun with the Olympics and evaluation project, revisiting some basic ideas in evaluation and sharing them with you.
Athletes (and evaluators) learn from mistakes.
And they learn from successes.