Denny, Terry

(b. 1930, Detroit, Michigan). Ed.D. Educational Psychology, University of Illinois; M.A. Developmental Psychology, University of Michigan; B.A. Political Science and Russian, Wayne State University.

Denny has been a teacher and mentor in the evaluation world for 40 years. He spent 20 years working with Robert Stake, J. Thomas Hastings, and other notables in and near the Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation (CIRCE) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Although he wrote about educational evaluation and taught courses in educational evaluation, he claims he never conducted an educational evaluation. He wrote stories and advocated storytelling as a necessary precursor to research and evaluation. His students suffered a strict regimen of gathering stories from the field and learning how to write them.

His message to the evaluation community was a simple one: no story, no evaluation. He thought most educational evaluators did not sufficiently understand the enterprise or the cultural context and because of this, did not know what or how to evaluate properly. He felt similarly about educational research. Denny argued further that even when evaluators and researchers did understand the story, they rarely had the ability to tell it to others. Illustrative of his claim that the story is central to our understanding of what goes on in schooling is his question: “When a parent, teacher, or student wants to learn about the quality of a school in a neighboring district, do they turn to a school board document or a state department report or an evaluation journal? Or do they ask a parent, teacher, or student from that district for their stories about what is going on?”