Section 1
If you've read the other blogs about the Notate Create Innovate workshops, you may have got the impression that I was happy with how they went... why wouldn't I be?! It was a lot of work but so much fun to do.
Success can be measured in so many ways - how happy were people, did you achieve your goals, or even using a rating system. Quite often academics will err on the side of quantitative data, finding graphs easy indicators of success or failure. I have to admit, I do like a graph.
On the other hand, a lot of people will value people's reactions and achievements more. These can be more immediate and give you a greater feeling of accomplishment. Seeing smiles or hearing that people would like to do another workshop with me really does make my day.
So, as there are definitely advantages and disadvantages to both methods, I thought I'd go through some of my findings here.
Section 2
The first piece of major evidence was the registrations. Having people want to sign up demonstrated that my advertising was effective. Perhaps it could have been more streamlined, but it was a learning process and I am proud of the turn-out in the end. My master spreadsheet tracked who signed up, to which workshop and also automatically sorted them into registers. This was very useful and saved a lot of time so I didn't have to reorganise all the information multiple times.
The aim was to have 8-10 children per workshop. In the conducting workshop we had 9 children and then we exceeded the capacity for the latter 2, with 13 children in each.
Previously, I mentioned that this presented some potential challenges with coping with a higher number of screens than expected. However, we found that asking siblings to use the same screen where possible minimised the number of different boxes on Zoom at the same time, making the session much easier to manage. I also helped make sure, at the start of the sessions, that each Zoom account had the children's first names written below so that it was easier to identify them mid-session. This also helped with register taking and freed up Megan to lead warm-up activities while I organised this in the waiting rooms.
Section 3
One of the things I wished to do from the beginning, to add a personal touch, was offer feedback to the parents about how their children engaged with each session. Following each workshop, Megan and I would have a quick meeting where we typed up notes about each child so I could send them out to the parents. We received good responses from this and the parents seemed to appreciate knowing what their child had achieved.
Section 4
Following the first session, in response to the feedback email, we got a lovely reply from one of the parents. This email asked if her children could attend the workshops instead of some scheduled school classes, as they had been more engaged during the session than they had been in their school work all year! This was an incredibly encouraging sign that we were meeting the original aim: to inspire children by offering fun and interactive workshops. I believe this shows we managed that!
Section 5
One of the other key indicators of the success of the workshops came from the feedback forms. I created a survey on Google Forms which you can find here.
This survey followed the same branding style as the adverts for the course and was sent out to the parents following the final workshop. I asked a variety of questions in it including open and closed questions, multiple choice, ratings and also written responses. I left all the written responses as optional, so as to encourage as many people as possible to take the survey. Out of the 8 different families that attended the workshops, 5 filled in the survey form. This was quite a good proportion, although it would have been preferable to have full representation.
The 5 responses accounted for 8 different children, with the average amount of children per household taking part being around 2.
It was interesting to see where people said they had heard about the workshops with music teachers and friends being the most popular method. It also suggests that none of the contacted schools did send out any of the information and that moving to Facebook was a good idea.
This survey also further confirmed that the ages we advertised towards were suitable and that we had a good spread of each age within the groups.
Two of the questions I asked were 'how satisfied were you with the workshops?' which was followed up with 'did your child enjoy the workshops?'. These questions were on a simple sliding scale from 1 to 5 where 1 was 'very dissatisfied' and 5 was 'very satisfied'.
From the answers to the survey, it is clear that both the parents and the children were really happy overall with the outcome of the workshops.
I also asked for additional feedback, giving space for the parents to respond freely and not restricting to pre-selected answers. The feedback here was incredibly good, with comments about how much fun the children had, the friendly and interactive atmosphere and the excellent organisation.
I wanted to include a question about the length of the workshops in the survey as when I had been researching, there had been some debate as to the best lengths. Some found that an hour was too long for their children, but I found that the 50 minute sessions during the Notate Create Innovate workshops were 'just right' for most parents, with some believing that it could have been longer. My worry was, that the younger children would struggle with lessons that went too much longer, as they covered quite a lot of ground.
The final questions were asking about possible improvements and general comments. One of the improvements we received was about the timings of the workshops, something I had debated over at the beginning of the process. It would be hard to find a time to suit everyone who wants to participate, especially given the uniqueness of online timetables. However, I will look further into what times would be best to run them in the future - looking specifically at circumstances at the time and assessing when most children would be home and available to do a workshop.
The other comment I got was about reading music. This is a slightly different style workshop to what I had done this time around, but definitely worth considering for future classes. This may be more applicable for those wishing to progress onto instruments.
Section 6
As a final marker of how well these workshops went, I decided to create another feedback form, this time for Megan. Although Megan had only been brought in to run the workshops, I thought her feedback as a teacher would be incredibly valuable to improve future workshops.
Overall, she seemed to think it ran very well. She did comment that the number of screens could become a problem if there were too many, which is something I was wary of throughout. Megan also mentioned that some other sessions for children with more experience would be good so it was less of a 'one size fits all' approach.
She did, however, really appreciate the notes page provided alongside the PowerPoints and found the content flowed and was received well.
Personally, I think the workshops were very successful. There were a few teething problems, but by the end they were mostly ironed out. I look forward to creating and leading more workshops and hope that I can reach more children in the future!