Program Evaluation: The findings are in!

CMW’s rigorous 18-month program evaluation led by Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf of WolfBrown was completed earlier this year, and her findings are available for downloading from the CMW website.

Dennie and all the CMW staff want to thank our students, parents, volunteers, and Board for sharing their time, stories, and thoughts throughout this involved process. CMW staff and Board members have been busy over the summer and fall digesting all the information that was gathered and working to incorporate the findings into our program design.

The findings cover topics such as student enrollment and persistence in CMW, student musicianship, students’ personal agency and involvement in the program, and students’ and families’ connections to the wider world. Here are some key quotes from the evaluation’s executive summary:

“When students persist in [CMW] and engage in its many offerings, the result is a distinctive young musician with strong, though basic, technique, a keen sense of the responsibilities of ensemble playing, a taste for a wide range of musical traditions, and a willingness to go beyond the score to improvise and compose.”

“A young person [who persists and engages with CMW] understands the personal agency and effort that it takes to engage, persist, and make progress. In Phase I this takes the form of joint child-family excitement over having and playing an instrument. In highly engaged Phase II and III students this agency develops into an investment in mastery and developing a distinct musical voice.”

“There is evidence that even outside of CMW lessons, music becomes a force organizing [students’] lives, focusing their activities and relationships. The program can also result in young people learning habits of hard work, investment and mutual responsibility. In sum, the experience of growing up at CMW can provide an anchor and a core identity.”

All of these positive findings relate to students who persist and engage. Therefore, the big challenge for CMW going forward is to make sure as many students as possible remain in the program, and become more engaged as they stay with us. While our retention rate is remarkably good (around 90%), the evaluation showed us that students sometimes lose ground between late Phase I and Phases II and III of the program, especially when they don’t have a clear sense that they’re making progress on their instruments.

The evaluation suggests that there are many things that CMW already does in a limited fashion that work to get students more engaged – including creating outside performance opportunities, pairing students with mentors or “practice buddies,” getting students involved in documenting their own progress, and creating more progress benchmarks for students to achieve.

Plans are under development to make sure that all students – especially those in danger of losing momentum – experience these opportunities. Our first experiments with practice buddies took place during the summer, and we’re working to expand this program to serve the entire student body this year. And a pilot program is underway to have students document their own progress… so stay tuned for some exciting updates at the next Performance Party or in the next edition of The Works.

It’s been really exciting for CMW’s teachers to have Dennie and her team work closely with us – we’re grateful for her input, and we’re looking forward to using these findings to continue to improve the CMW experience for the whole community.

Click here to read Dennie's evaluation.

-Chloe Kline, CMW staff

Editor's note: Dennie is also the co-author of a recent essay, Building Creative Capital, an "in-depth look at building creative capital as a powerful way to plan
for, execute, and measure the impact of the arts and culture on
communities." Read her essay here.