Methods: Measuring the Impact of Music-based Mentoring

Evaluation and Outcome Indicators: The Distance Travelled Wheel

This page is part of a resource pack on Music-based mentoring.

 

Music-based mentoring is a programme designed to encourage change in the mentees. Whether you’re a mentor or a coordinator, you will need to be clear what changes you’re trying to encourage and how you will recognise when you have achieved them. The key tool here is the Individual Action Plan.

Coordinators will also need monitoring data so they know how many and what type of both mentors and mentees have worked on the programme, how many stayed the course, and what happened to those who left early.

Good documentation is therefore essential to a productive music-based mentoring programme. The above examples suggest the types of information you may want to collect, but you will need to adapt them to suit your organisation’s own policies and perhaps to meet specific funders’ requirements.

A key tool, widely used in personal development activities, is the Distance Travelled Wheel:

The spokes of the wheel represent various aspects of a mentee’s life – here we ask for the following input:

• how do they rate their musical abilities?
• how much do they know about what opportunities there are to develop their music making?

and how they feel about themselves:

• do they feel people listen to them?
• do they make good decisions?
• do they feel they have control over their lives?

A mentor and mentee would plot the scores on the spokes of the wheel close to the beginning of their relationship – perhaps at the time of developing their Individual Action Plan. 

Then, at the end of the programme, mentee and mentor plot scores again, on the same wheel. 

There are two ways you can use the results from a Distance Travelled Wheel. If you have many mentees, you can add up all their “before” and their “after” scores for each spoke, and see whether there has been an improvement. This is what Youth Music did for its large-scale Youth Music Mentors programme*. With 100 and more mentees, they were able to show that the improvements were statistically significant.

With small numbers of mentees, adding up all the scores may not tell you anything. It’s possible, for example, that a score may be worse at the end of the mentoring relationship than at the beginning. This does not necessarily mean that mentoring has made things worse! It could be that the mentee has developed a more realistic sense of their abilities or feelings about themselves.

Sitting down together at the end of the relationship, mentor and mentee can explore the before and after scores and make sense of what has happened to the mentee on their mentoring journey. This would be an important step in the mentee developing a sense of reflection – a key tool if they themselves want to go on to be a mentor or music leader themselves.

Coordinators will need to keep other records, including:

• A profile of each mentee – perhaps age, address, gender, daytime location (school, work or elsewhere?), ethnicity, music genres they’re interested in, types of music they actively make, their challenging circumstances, and how and by whom they were referred to your mbm programme.
• A record of mentees who leave the programme early – why that was, whether they still benefited from the programme.
• A profile of each mentor – to help with matching mentor to mentee
• Feedback forms from mentors – perhaps their view on their training, supervision, whether they found mentoring a worthwhile activity, and what skills they had developed. 

For extensive guidance on keeping a track record for mentees see Mentor Track Record:

References:

* For more information see Attuned to Engagement.doc p17 fig 1