Grades Dont Matter Wellbeing and Life Skills do

[Music]

okay good evening everybody

i’m here to talk to you tonight about my

vision and my belief

in education for not only students to

survive the contemporary world but also

to thrive

and it is my fundamental belief that

grades don’t matter

well-being and life skills do

now to tell you how a little bit to give

you a background as to how i came to

this conclusion

it’s important for you to know how my

journey in education started

i trained to be a teacher in 2011 in the

uk

and i went straight immediately into

working for

inner city school state comprehensive a

very large school

and it became clear to me very quickly

that in order to be deemed a good

teacher

my students had to get good grades

and i was lucky i was one of the very

few that was often deemed good

or if not outstanding and it was because

my students got good grades

and i really thought that i had cracked

the nail

sort of hit the nail on the head i’d i’d

undiscovered the secret to

being a fantastic teacher i thought i

knew

what education was all about

nine years later in 2020 here we are

and i can’t tell you how much oh how

wrong

my thinking was back then how flawed it

was

and in these last nine years i’ve

learned more

than what i had during my entire career

in school as a student myself

in these nine years my belief and my

ideology

of education has changed but the

students i see in front of me year in

year out they haven’t in fact

if anything i would say they are more

obsessed with getting good grades

now i really had to ask myself

well where does this stem from and why

are young people like this

and it turned out that i was also like

this as a student myself

and i had to take myself back into my

childhood to understand

why you see my parents were immigrants

to the uk

and neither of them had studied in

higher education

they worked multiple jobs and long hours

and so from a real young age

they made it clear to us that if we

didn’t want

to struggle and have the same strifes as

them

we’d need to study we’d need to get good

grades

we’d need to work hard we’d need to go

to university

to get better jobs but i only represent

a small proportion

of the population and i’ve really tried

over the years

to understand from my students why

they feel that getting good grades will

guarantee them

the success in life and i’ve had a range

of reasons

going from well it’ll be a

disappointment to my parents

right the way through to well my next

door neighbor went to a really good

university so i have to

too and underpinning all of these

reasons

was one belief and it’s this hard wide

belief as a species that i feel we have

developed

in that good grades are going to get us

a successful future now i’m not here to

tell you that that’s not the case

because it is

and for most of us it is if i look at my

lifestyle now

i’m certainly more comfortable than that

of my parents

but did that education really prepare me

for the life that i was about to live

did it really prepare me for the career

that i was about to embark on

and if you ask me that quite simply no

and looking at research and statistics

it’s become clear that that this this

isn’t the case for everyone

in canada alone underemployment of

graduates who have studied hard gone to

university

graduated is sitting at 35 percent

in australia at 26 and in the uk

38 of graduates are recorded

as not working in full-time employment

after six months of graduating

so for those that really believe that

getting good grades and working hard and

doing making all that effort is going to

guarantee them

a successful life well that’s not quite

the case

furthermore a global study was conducted

and it was found that almost half of

graduates

felt that in fact their education

didn’t in fact prepare them for the

career that they were about to lead or

the life that they were about to live

now i know i’m giving you a lot of

statistics here but i’ve got one more

that’s really important to make the

point that i’m making

and that is we will on average as modern

21st century citizens

changed career between five and seven

times throughout our life

so if you think about it this notion

of coming to school to learn and acquire

academic knowledge

yes is very important but the to have

the fundamental belief

that getting good grades is going to

guarantee a success

it doesn’t quite fit

now i want to turn my attention to

well-being

where does this fit in with well-being

well

it’s no secret that in fact the pressure

that our young

students and young people feel in

today’s

day is more than ever before

the pressures that are on them are more

than the pressures that were on myself

and more than the pressures that were on

the generation before us

academically students are studying more

than what they ever have before

and non-academically in an

extracurricular capacity

they are engaging with more things than

they ever have

and we’re not just talking about sports

and music or arts

we’re talking about the lgbtq movement

we’re talking about climate change the

pressures

on students is rising and it’s so high

that ultimately it’s going to impact

their well-being

now the world health organization they

stated

and after doing some extensive research

that half of all mental health issues

start at the age of 14. and almost

all of them all of these cases will

often go

untreated and undetected and they’ll

come

later on in life resurface as bigger

problems

not only that they identified that

globally

depression is one of the leading causes

of illnesses in adolescence

where the in suicide was the third

leading cause of death in 15 to 19

year olds so if you put the two things

together

we’ve got this increasing demand and

pressure

on young children and young people we

have this increasing demand

to get good grades to go on to good

institutions

to get good careers and success out of

it

and then on the other hand we seem to be

compromising our well-being

and it just doesn’t quite work and year

in year out

as my time in teaching has progressed

and as i’ve gained experience and as

i’ve learned

i’ve realized that this

is becoming the forefront a full frontal

issue in our education

policy making we need to be looking at

students well-being

because there’s no point in trying to

get good grades or trying to achieve

success

when the one thing that’s going to hold

you back is your own personal well-being

and therefore i have very slowly

evolved my view of teaching and

education

and i fundamentally believe that schools

should be seen as

mentorship and support systems and not

uh givers of knowledge of all kind

the online learning platform is growing

so in

increasingly growing so quickly that

it’s easily accessible for anybody to

access any information

in fact if i tell my students to

find out what radiation is they can

pretty much do that within five minutes

of looking on a laptop

and searching on the internet i don’t

really need to impart that information

to them anymore

what i need to be doing is building

their skills

their confidence learning who they are

personally and individually

and making sure that i don’t do a

one-size-fits-all

because a one-size-fits-all doesn’t work

in this 21st century

we should be enriching well-being and

life skills

and we should be providing safe spaces

for our young students

to talk and explore difficult topics

but most importantly we should be

developing that self-efficacy

confidence and self-belief

now as an educator i know that i’m not

the only one beginning to think this way

research tells us that a growing number

of teachers

and educators across the globe have

identified that

online learning will eventually become

the new norm

some even believe that schools will

begin to exist

only online

a lot of people educators and young

young people themselves are starting to

question the cost of higher education

versus the gains that they will make out

of it

is it worth all that debt when i know

that i’m not necessarily going to get a

high paying job at the end of it

and this soft skills decline is now

being recognized as highly important

in this research that i looked at it was

recorded that over 80 percent of

employers

had had stated that grades or even to

some extent

degrees really didn’t matter to them

what

mattered was what that person had to

offer

what skills were they coming with to

that workplace

could that candidate sit in a meeting or

in a conference and communicate

clearly and effectively could they build

interpersonal and interpersonal skills

could they have the knowledge of

emotional intelligence

in order to be successful and work with

many different people and it’s these

soft skills that i’m referring to

as these life skills and developing and

enriching those

and the fourth key strand that i put

here was that alternative routes

through education are no longer being

considered as alternatives

because surely there can’t only be one

path to success

and that one path can’t be relying on

good grades

as a result i changed my approach to

teaching

where possible i engage with the

students

and i talk to them today was an example

this afternoon my students came into my

room and they said that they were

exhausted

i asked them why i gave them that space

to talk

they were talking about their projects

and their essays

and things that they had going on i

asked them questions

we talked a little more we related it

back to the chemistry that they were

learning

and at the end of the lesson they said

you know what we feel so much better for

having that space to talk

could we do that once a week and then i

told them

that i had not purposely but i had

engaged that chat

that talk for a little longer than what

i would have liked given that i was

doing this talk tonight

and it just reaffirmed and gave me that

more

more confidence and more affirmation to

be able to stand here and say to you

that i know that this works the truth of

the matter is there’s that

very same class i told them that i

wanted to

i wanted them to research some topics

for the next lesson

and i know that they will come to that

lesson with the knowledge of those

topics

i no longer have to teach them those i

just have to mentor them

and support them in developing in

becoming the people

they want to be and thus

in conclusion to my talk tonight i just

want to really reiterate here

that learning is lifelong we should

never

encourage our children or say to our

children that they’re coming to school

to get good grades to graduate and get a

degree and

that’s it research shows us that that’s

not the case

we engage in lifelong learning now it’s

not about what we learn or how well we

did in it

it’s about what we did and how we’re

going to apply it

it’s about the process and i

fundamentally believe that moving

forward

it’s my vision in a far away dream in

the future

that one day universities and higher

education institutions

won’t just take our young people on

grades

or on a personal statement they will

take them based on their attributes

and on for them as an individual and

what they can offer

because we’re all individual and each of

one of our paths

are all very unique there’s no

saying that what one person will do now

that another person can’t do

in five years time and therefore

we should reinvent and rethink our ideas

and our ideologies

of education too thank you for listening

you