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