Thoughts about Self-evaluation Frameworks

For about half my working week I’m an Early Years Musician.  The other half I spend as a freelance evaluator, working for music organisations, MEHs and community projects such as The Trowbridge Song Project.

For about half my working week I’m an Early Years Musician.  The other half I spend as a freelance evaluator, working for music organisations, MEHs and community projects such as The Trowbridge Song Project.

I’ve recently completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Evaluation Studies.  My research topic was data collection tools used in early years group music-making.  It’s been hard work, but really enjoyable and it’s made an incredible difference to my music practice.  Reading a large amount of published research has made a difference, but more than that, video-recording the music-making of a group of children with whom I work, and analysing the video, has been truly illuminating. 

To give an example: I’ve always used visual and tactile stimuli a lot in the group sessions that I do, but until I repeatedly watched it on video, I never appreciated the extent to which the children in the group absorb themselves in tactile exploration of instruments.  Noticing this has made a big difference to the choices of instruments I offer children in different situations. 

I could give umpteen other examples of things which were observed in the video which I’ve never noticed in the ‘live’ sessions – largely relating to children’s curiosity, creativity and spontaneity, such as Child A spending 2 minutes pretending that a castanet clapper was an aeroplane. 

Getting back to postgraduate studying – taking the time to reflect and examine my practice has made such difference, that I’m thinking of doing a masters.  But what research topic to explore?  Ideas for further study (an essential requirement of the concluding section of my PG Cert research report) included self-evaluation for early years musicians.  Early Years Musicians so often work in isolation, would tools for self-evaluation be useful?  The kinds of evaluation frameworks I frequently help my evaluation clients to develop might also be really useful for practitioners to self-evaluate. 

So, the point of all the above is – I just want to get some ideas of what early years musicians are currently doing in terms of evaluating their own practice.  The YM Professional Practice Scale and Do, Review, Improve are great but are necessarily broad.  My feeling is that a tool which delves much deeper into the nitty-gritty of early years music would be really useful.  How do you evaluate your practice?   Are structures or guidelines provided for you within a project or organisation?  Do you find using existing documents like Do, Review, Improve effective?  Do you borrow frameworks from other professions – teaching, music therapy, early years practice?  It’d be really useful to get some input from others so I can decide if this a topic worthy of a 20k word masters dissertation.  Thanks.