The Quality Criteria Approach

The quality criteria approach is a critical approach developing strong debates among community stakeholders to develop value-based learning community initiatives.

The Quality Criteria accompanying measures are highly relevant and valuable to any learning community initiative.
At a certain point, or due to certain difficulties, the learning community stakeholders agree to make a time-out and organize open debates on what happened and what should happen in the initiative.
Such open reflections need tools, and the Quality Criteria tool is precisely designed for this purpose: to guide a qualified evaluation of the qualities, threats and opportunities of learning communities and learning community initiatives.
This measure will allow the learning community initiative to assess own performance, to critically address actions and decisions and to formulate useful lessons learned for future action.

Some learning community initiatives might decide to include such open debates and evaluations as an annual activity, and to involve professional evaluators to support this activity.

What are the opportunities, challenges and obstacles in the Quality Criteria approach?

• The evaluation activities might be too academic and lose clarity and transparency
• Some stakeholders might not wish to participate in such an open evaluation
• The evaluation activity is not kept simple and straight-forward
• The evaluation is used as alibi for continuing problematic practices

• A professional evaluator could ensure the quality of the open evaluation and produce clear and useful conclusions
• The evaluation is an opportunity to address un-spoken or not yet addressed problems and challenges
• The evaluation is an opportunity to re-valuate the basic principles and values of learning communities and to critically review these principles and values