4.1 Top tips from a musician
Throughout these documents we thought it would be good to hear from musicians delivering the work to give you their top 3 tips for working as a Noise Solution musician. Click to watch the video
4.2 Let us know they turned up: Attendance
Well, the first bit of information to share is that everyone needs to know asap if the participant did (or didn’t) turn up. This is true whether they attended or not! You need to mark their attendance and write your report, so we can keep everyone up to speed with what’s happening, as close to it happened as is practical. If you need a reminder about how to mark attendance and write a report it was in Rueben’s video and you’ll also be able to review all the training with timestamps telling you where to find any of the topics covered from within your community ‘MyStream’ in the training section. If it’s still not immediately obvious to you what to check then just give us a call!
Why is keeping track of attendance vital? Well it does several things:
Firstly, it shows us what kind of attendance a participant has and helps us intervene quickly if, for example, two sessions in a row don’t happen. Schools are super hot on attendance - they view it as a metric that indicates if someone is vulnerable so they want to know it asap. We often have to report to them within hours of a session happening if the participant turned up. We also track attendance so we can
keep an eye on all the sessions that are happening (many hundreds of hours a month) and the system will tell us that it’s an area we need to be aware of. As importantly, the professional attached the young person will know and hopefully together you can find a better way to make the session work. Maybe the time or day of the session is just wrong..?
Secondly, it keeps the platform automation working for upcoming sessions. By that I mean our platform looks at how a session is progressing and automates messages to participants and families, dependent on the information it has. If you are doing online sessions this is particularly important! If you mark attended when they didn’t turn up the platform will email the professionals with the wrong text and tell the family that a session happened when it didn’t. Not a strong look...
Thirdly, a useful by-product of your sessions being kept unto date and accurate is that you are able to automatically track your monthly invoice-able hours from within the platform, which makes invoicing much much easier for you. Sessions to invoice for will appear in your community, meaning you don’t have to keep track of attended, who did and didn’t turn up in a separate diary. We’re doing this to try and make your invoicing easier. This data is a only a guide drawing on the info you’ve provided, so keeping it updated is totally in your interest. Just saying…
4.3 The importance of reporting
Transcript of this video is in this grey box
Ideally, we’d encourage that the report is done immediately after the session. This might not be possible for a number of reasons; you might be working in a school and they might want you out of the room the moment the session has finished, for example. But, reports should be done absolutely no later than 24 hours after a session. It’s a live document (as far as the professional who referred to us is concerned) so it becomes far less useful the longer it’s left. Professionals, amongst busy workloads, need time to react to things.
If you take nothing else from this video - IT IS THIS!
It should be clearly noted that your report gets automatically copied and sent straight into an email that goes to the professional (please try and make sure spelling is reasonable) and sense check it to
make sure you’d be happy for someone else to read it back to you. It’s not just going to us, it’s going to us and the professionals in the participants Community Group! You should also be aware that family and participants have every right to read these , so make sure what you put in them won’t put you or us in a bad light.
We pride ourselves on being good communicators, and that includes keeping professionals in the loop. The report is your way of communicating with us and the other professionals around the participant. Maybe helping get the young person to their session, or
saying “look how well this young person is doing" by including the positive things we hear them saying so often in sessions, or the young person has said they’d like to access some other education opportunity after sessions finished.
“I’ll often literally quote a positive thing a participant has said in a session directly in a report - its a great way to grab peoples attention” Musician
The report can be a tool to ask how can you as their worker/teacher/social worker support that happening? Or it could be a means of inviting that professional to a session (something we really encourage). It’s a
communication tool to get the best outcome for that participant.
Report writing is an essential part of what we do. Along with the well-being data collected through start and end questionnaires, session reports give professionals an insight into what’s going on in sessions. Initially some musicians have felt a little intimidated by this but remember ‘not all professionals wear suits’. Your work is valuable (own it) and it doesn’t need to be scary and you don’t need to write a moment by moment account of everything that happened in the session. In fact that’s exactly what we don’t want. It’s about how the participant reacted and felt - not so much what they did.
The report is a chance to relay how a participant has (hopefully) become more autonomous and competent in the session, to describe any particular highlights and to make comparisons with previous sessions. Let’s be clear, most professionals aren’t going to be interested in what a G major chord is, or what parallel compression or EQ masking is. They will be interested if a participant gained a sense of confidence or identified something they’d like to do in the future from learning something (but not necessarily the process itself).
What they are interested in is the participant’s engagement and wellbeing, any problems highlighted or success gained. Two or three short paragraphs are enough and shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to write.
It’s in no way about trying to impress us with how well it’s going all the time, that’d be unrealistic. Be completely honest if it’s not working - we’d rather know so we can suggest options. It’s about communicating what actually happened in the session and liaising to get the right outcome for the young person you’re working with, whatever the situation.
If you’ve been paired with an experienced musician they should be able to help by going over your first few - and obviously we read them as well (as does the professional who referred). We are always really happy to talk you through your first couple; just ask!
A real life example of a great report (you’ll note we only ever use initials in reports to avoid participants being identified)
Today was AW's final session (which was a home session due to AW being unwell last week). We had a very reflective session that covered a few areas that AW had experienced during the Noise Solution experience. AW was very open towards some of her concerns for before, during, and after the sessions, which allowed for us to have a very informative discussion about an array of different topics. A key part of the sessions that AW gained was an increase in her confidence. Especially with the initial studio session. AW expressed her concerns about experiencing PTSD in the studio due to some past issues relating to the studio environment, but she had surprised herself with how she handled it and found the experience very empowering. Being able to express her tastes in music in a safe environment also helped her to find value in what she enjoys. AW often expressed that her love for things such as anime and certain games was "sad", but she has been able to see that their importance to her is something worth expressing and something to be proud of. Overall, AW has had an incredibly reflective journey in such a short period. Although she has learnt some new music techniques, theories, and technologies, most importantly, she has been able to see a different perspective of her creativity, and it has empowered both her confidence and curiosity.
4.4 Video reflections - a vital tool
You can do amazing things in a session but they fade to a memory really quick and it’s difficult to easily communicate to a parent or a social worker. But, If you get the participant to say out loud what was amazing - that’s different, that means they’ve owned it. Even better, If you’ve also recorded it and shared it on their community then that means other people have seen it and the participant has it mirrored back at them from multiple places - that’s when you get long lasting impact.
Reflections are often as impactful (in different ways) as the very sessions themselves - they can add to the impact and they can amplify it, by including the family and key workers in seeing what you and the participant are achieving.
They are not an ‘add on’ that you might feel you need to put up with. We’re genuinely hoping you embrace them as a useful and valuable tool to increase the likelihood of improving how a participant feels about themselves.
But Here’s the elephant in the room - lots of musicians initially at least, don’t like doing them or asking participants to do them - but once you embrace it the impacts are huge.
What to actually ask - we’re hoping by the time you read this you will have something called the ‘reflectionizer’ in your community on your and the participants feed where they will be able to choose to answer questions prepared for them - this should make life easier for everyone - they have control and you can guide the conversation with them more easily. The questions are all related to getting the participant to talk about things related to those three basic psychological needs.
See the questions on the page
List of questions in the ‘reflectionizer' (we hope will soon be in your community page: Can you see which of the three basic psychological needs each question is trying to ask about?).
1. Could you describe a moment from today where you felt like you could just be yourself?
2. What was something you got to decide or do your way today?
3. Was there anything new you tried today?
4. Was there anything you got better at today?
5. Was there a moment from today where you felt like, ‘Yeah, I got this!’?
6. What are you proudest of from today?
7. Who have you connecting differently with because of these sessions?
8. Do you feel like people on your blog ‘get you’ or have your back?
9. What’s one thing someone did or said since the last session that's had an impact on how you feel about these sessions?
10. What one moment stands out to you from todays session?
11. How do you think you’ll feel after leaving the session today?
12. If you were telling a friend about how today went, what’s one thing you’d definitely want them to know?
13. How does it feel when we look over what you’ve achieved in your digital story?
14. If you think back to when your sessions started, how have you changed?
15. How does it feel sharing your music with new people today?
16. What do you think/feel hearing your own music back?
17. What would you differently if you were starting again today?
18. What will you take away from these sessions?
19. What does music mean to you?
20. What were your expectations coming into todays session?
21. Are there any other different things you’d like to try in future sessions?
22. How does it feel sharing your music with new people today?
23. Have you surprised yourself in what you have achieved today?
24. What was your favourite part of the session today?
25. What would you give the session out of ten?
26. How do you feel hearing your own music back?
Take some time to think about how you could follow up these questions to get more insight from participants - maybe using open questions for example (questions that don’t have yes or no answers like “how did that make you feel?” Or maybe using scaling questions - “on a scale of 1 to 10 how many of those decisions were yours?” Or “On a scale of 1 to 10 how much of that did you understand?” These are great ways to get more insight and get the participant to reflect on their experience.
Remember though we never force reflection videos to happen - you make the call about when and even if they are appropriate - sometimes they won’t be at all, but sometimes the participant just needs a little gentle push out of their comfort zone - you might need to suggest that that only their voice appears at least initially or that you just capture what they say in text or it doesn’t happen at all…Thats rare but we trust you to make that call in the session.
4.5 Video reflections - Examples
1 of an end reflection video
Example 2 of an end reflection video
4.6 Naming reflection videos: THIS IS IMPORTANT
Transcript for this video in this grey box
Our system can automatically analyse what people say in their videos, identifying when they talk about autonomy, competence, or relatedness. You might have seen the short video we use to get consent from participants for this analysis. Please take a moment to watch it with them so you both understand what we’re asking. We only ever analyse videos when we have consent.
Once consent is given, there’s just one simple but essential thing we need you to do:
Name any video where a participant shares something about their experience as "Reflection".
This is the trigger that tells our system the video should be analysed. Without it, we might end up processing loads of music videos instead—which wouldn’t be useful!
Most of the time, this will be the actual reflection videos, but sometimes a participant might say something interesting while doing something else. If you think their words are insightful in any video, tag the video as "Reflection", and as long as we have consent, it will be automatically picked up for analysis.
We can't do this without you, so please get into the habit of naming reflection videos this way.
Thanks so much—this small step will help us enormously!
4.7 Logging a safeguarding concern
Transcript for this video in this grey box
This isn’t your safeguarding training, that will be more in depth. This is just a small section to outline what you do in the platform when you identify something is a safeguarding issue.
We take safeguarding and child protection very seriously. We often work with vulnerable young people, and sometimes vulnerable adults, with quite complicated needs and lives.
Hopefully you will have followed the training and explained in session one of every new set of sessions that everything they do in sessions is confidential and only shared with people they are willing to share with. However, if they share anything that you consider to be concerning, that means you are concerned that they might harm themselves or someone else, you will have to tell somebody else, in the interests of their own safety. But if you can you will discuss it with them first. (remember that conversation, this is where it saves trust in you as a musician because you’ve pre warned them).
So let’s say something has come up you are worried about or not sure about. When you write a session report, there is a tick a box to flag a safety concern. This will immediately notify the senior leadership team and the Designated safeguarding leads via email. We’ll look at it and make a decision about if it needs to be escalated, or give you advice on how to proceed.
In your session report write down exactly how it was divulged to you, with no opinion, just fact. We’ll tell you if we need any more information.
If it’s something that turns out to be of no concern, or is already being handled then there’s no harm done and nobody will be annoyed with you for doing so. If you don’t, then you might be letting an important piece of information go unnoticed.
If you make a judgement in a session that something is really serious, don’t ever make any promises about not sharing what you’ve heard. Remain calm non judgemental and curious without asking leading questions. Ultimately you
are there to observe and report on what happened or was said, not investigate. Observe and report
There is also access to the Noise Solution Child Protection policy on the platform that you should make yourself familiar with. Within the policy there is also a handy flow chart to follow should you need to. How to find policies is in section 3.3 and there is a short video here - we did a lot of work with musicians to make it useable and to make sense and be helpful for you.
Obviously, if there’s something that seems imminently dangerous and you’re not sure how to proceed, you should phone one of us, or the key worker depending on the circumstances. In a real emergency, you should just always call the emergency services.
You will have to do regular child protection training while working for Noise Solution where we’ll go into more detail about what signs to look out for that might be a concern.
4.8 Booking a studio.
Last thing from me - you will probably need to book a studio for sessions 6-10. This means booking a studio for the last 5 sessions. Though occasionally it’s appropriate for every sessions to occur in a studio (your conversations at the start with family and professionals will lead you on this). Below is a video on where to find details in your community of the studios we currently have available.
We’d advise you book the studio sessions as soon as you know you need them though, nothing worse than the studio not being available when you and they are.
Participants for these courses will be allocated to you because they are within an hour of you. You’ll probably be using the same studios again and again with different participants. It makes more sense for you to book those studios as you’ll have spoken with the participant/family/professionals involved and will know about times and dates already. There is a map of available studios and contact details that we can share with you
That’s enough from me, I hope you enjoy your work with Noise Solution - I believe there is one more video you’ll receive in a week or so - for a few more tips on things like how to build trust in sessions and technical tips like how best to use your phone to capture highlights - all super useful stuff. As always if you have any questions please just ask us.
Notes:
Appendix
The list of things below looks daunting but remember we’ve got loads of musicians brilliantly doing this and they were felt as daunted as you when they started! Even Jimi Hendrix was rubbish at guitar the first time he picked one up - this takes practice and we are here to help.
Hopefully we’ve broken down everything in detail in this training aid above and it’s other parts 1 through to 5. Our intention was to deliver it in manageable chunks.
You are also going to shadow someone else for the first couple of sessions; you’ll have a Noise Solution ‘buddy’ too ask questions of and we’ll be on hand to answer questions as well. You are not alone! but we thought a complete quick overview of the ten weeks might be a useful as well. So there is a link to one below.
Click here to see a handy PDF reference you can download that is an overview of a set of sessions. It details what it looks like for you when we break down what needs to happen each week?
Notes: