Creative Evaluation: The Art of Reflection

Over a year on from the culmination of our Teacher Development Fund project, it is interesting to reflect on the benefits and continued learning we gained from the evaluation of our project, Create, Speak, Thrive: Bringing Words to Life. Our approach to evaluation was as collaborative and co-created as our project. We commissioned an external evaluation team from the University of Hertfordshire, who were involved right from the inception of the idea and pilot study. The university team listened carefully to our initial plans and ambitions and helped craft a set of evaluation aims and questions that reflected the genuine intrigue and real learning opportunities available to our key stakeholders. They supported the development of the project design, ensuring reflective practice and evaluation were embedded from the start, which really set us up for success.

We collected data through a variety of methods, including focus groups with all partners, dyad interviews with artist-teacher partnerships, and group interviews with school senior leaders. We embedded continual reflective practice throughout, including artists and teachers reflecting on each session and holding collective space at the end of every professional learning session or delivery meeting to reflect on our progress so far. Getting everyone to work together on evaluation was imperative and nurturing an atmosphere of continual reflection was both a challenge and one of the highlights of our project. We were careful to leave space for every individual to reflect in a way that worked for them, which meant being open and flexible with how reflection was shared. For example, we encouraged teachers to draw reflective pictures and share reflections via WhatsApp voice notes.

This openness worked really well for some of the contributors on the project, but we also found that some partners who were new to enquiry-led practices struggled. In year two, we added the use of a variation of Graham Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle to help scaffold the teacher-artist partnerships’ reflections, which proved to be very fruitful, helping to overcome some of those challenges.

Alongside the formal evaluation of the project in year two, we asked each teacher-researcher to identify an action research question to explore relevant to their own school context. This was bespoke in each school and was supported by our Speech and Language specialist to provide tools to collect and monitor data. Although this data didn’t contribute directly to the formal evaluation report, it helped tailor teachers’ learning to their own goals and school improvement plans. This was borne out in the teacher focus groups and interviews.

Throughout the project, we shared our evaluation in many ways. We produced a formal evaluation report, which was shared in person at a public event with panel discussions, workshops and an art exhibition. We also produced a series of blog posts and created a documentary film. Since finishing the project, we have also published journal articles. 

Producing such a broad range of reflective documents meant that we were able to comprehensively communicate the impact the project had on the teachers and artists to a broad range of audiences. Moving forward with phase two of Create, Speak, Thrive, we now want to measure the long-term impact that the teachers’ development has had on the students and the wider school environments.

With thanks to the participating schools — Roebuck Primary, Hillborough Junior School, Featherstone Wood Primary, Ferrars Academy, Denbigh Primary, Icknield Primary and Round Diamond Primary.