Red Ladder Theatre Company: Evaluation
What does a child need to succeed? This a question that every individual or organization working for the positive growth and development of youth must endeavor to answer in order to formulate successful strategies which help them grow up to be healthy, strong, confident, and productive adults. What systems can we implement to make certain our work is not only supporting individuals whose lives have been shattered by violence, abuse, lack of opportunity, and poor choices, but also proactively developing strategies which help students not merely to survive but to thrive? Red Ladder answers this question through its continually evolving and deepening evaluation practices.
Red Ladder has created a comprehensive standard of evaluation that captures vital group and individual participant progress information. This process is based on groundbreaking research: the Search Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, the National Cultural Alliance and Shirley Brice Heath. Red Ladder’s evaluation practices hinge on the Search Institute’s findings that there are some concrete experiences and qualities—“developmental assets”—which exert a tremendous, enduring and positive influence on young people’s lives. Once acquired, these developmental assets help young people to make wise decisions, choose positive paths, and grow to be competent, caring, and responsible adults. These assets are grouped into two categories, External Assets and Internal Assets.
External Assets include the following asset types: Support, Empowerment, Boundaries and Expectations and Constructive Use of Time. Internal Assets include: Commitment to Learning, Positive Values, Social Competencies, and Positive Identity. Red Ladder has worked to develop a wide ranging system of internal and external evaluation practices that measure each participant’s growth in these eight pivotal asset types.
This evaluation begins before Red Ladder ever meets a student or group. Teachers and community service professionals, who work with the children day in and day out, are asked to assess the ability levels of the students selected for Red Ladder workshops in a variety of different categories relating to the developmental asset types. These categories include each student’s level of self-esteem, ability to articulate thoughts and feelings, initiate new ideas, imagine creative solutions to problems, work collaboratively, assume leadership, focus on a task at hand, and learn from past mistakes. After this evaluation is completed and analyzed, Red Ladder Company members review the information provided and use it to begin structuring participant-specific programming for the upcoming workshops.
From this point, assessment is an ongoing, internal process. Following every workshop Company members evaluate, in extensive detail, the progress made by each participant as well as by the group as a whole. This allows the Company to address which assets need special continued focus and which only need to be praised or reinforced in forthcoming workshops. Red Ladder is thus able to plan successive workshops in a way that ensures that every participating student will receive the maximum benefit possible.
At the conclusion of the participating group’s workshop experience, Red Ladder calls upon teachers and community service professionals to complete another evaluation of their students’ abilities. The aim of this evaluation is to take a post-participation snapshot of the students’ ability levels in order to see how well skills developed within the workshop setting are translated into the participants’ daily lives. The information is then compiled and compared with pre-workshop ratings, allowing the impact of the Red Ladder program to be quantified and shared. Thus, the findings of these pre- and post-workshop evaluations are based on the external perspective of the professionals who are able to observe and interact with participants on an ongoing basis across a variety of settings.
The results of these evaluations are staggering. Graph A “Program Evaluation” below, shows the incredible developmental growth that Red Ladder participants undergo. Over the past three seasons, these evaluations demonstrate that on a verage an astounding 83% of Red Ladder’s participants experienced a growth in self-esteem, 77% improved their capacity to work collaboratively, and 73% percent increased their ability to articulate thoughts and feelings. Of participants, 55% expanded their capacity to imagine creative solutions to problems, 51% elevated their ability to focus on tasks, and 43% assumed roles of leadership. Following their Red Ladder involvement, 45% of students demonstrated an increased ability to initiate new ideas, 38% showed growth in their ability to learn from past mistakes, and 19% of participants rose in all areas of ability.
The improvisational theatre techniques employed by Red Ladder produce astounding results year after year with diverse populations in a wide range of settings. Red Ladder evaluation results remain consistent across all age groups and varying economic, social, and cultural circumstances. Participants range in age from 6 to 60 and participant ethnicity over the last three years breaks out as 59% Latino/a, 17% Anglo, 10% Asian-American, 10% African-American, and 4% other.
For further information on Red Ladder evaluation practices, please contact Program Director Karen Altree Piemme at karenp@sjrep.com.
“[Red Ladder] helped the kids become more open about their feelings,…strengthened the unity of the entire group,…[and promoted a] noticeable increase in teamwork and sharing within the…group.” - Ricardo Cortez, Youth Specialist, MACSA
“The Red Ladder experience had a significant effect on building self-esteem and confidence in our students, encouraging them to take risks and tapping skill and talents not easily brought out by regular school.” - The Staff of the Bill Wilson School
“Red Ladder is one of the most innovative arts programs helping to implement social change.” - Pam Gerber, Founding Executive Director, City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley
“[Red Ladder’s] growth has evolved directly in response to community demand. It has continually achieved astounding results, with participants demonstrating increased short- and long-term abilities to make positive lifestyle choices.” - Nancy Glaze, Arts Program Director, David and Lucile Packard Foundation
“When local companies combine their resources to support quality programming such as the Red Ladder Theatre Company, we can truly make a worthwhile investment in the future of this community.” - James R. Carreker, Former President and CEO, Aspect Communications