Mrs Anna Owen, Deputy Principal
Anyone involved with workplace recruitment processes, or hoping to secure a position at a progressive workplace, would know that employers are increasingly looking beyond applicants’ academic records, to the ‘soft skills’ they bring to their teams.
Tertiary qualifications are integral and always will be. However, an individual’s character, her perceived potential and her demonstrated ability to learn adaptively, are the holistic qualities driving employee recruitment and development strategies across a growing number of industries.
This trend has largely been driven by the changing skills set valued by high-performing, agile companies. Warren Berger’s thought-provoking book, A More Beautiful Question, expands on this notion through a granular analysis of questioning in the creative space (2014).
Berger suggests that ‘ … whereas in the past, one needed to appear to have “all the answers” in order to rise up in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers’ (2014, p. 6).
If the corner offices of leading organisations of the future are to be occupied by adaptive leaders, who may not be the fount of all knowledge, but who know which questions to ask, how can educators help prepare our students for this future?
To begin with, schools must respond to the positive lead of these global companies by reporting on the academic growth of our students in the context of the expert learner. This may mean mapping out the skills required of adaptive learning and tracking students’ progress against them.
We also need to find new metrics and new ways of reporting externally on soft skills. This is a concept well understood in educational institutions — if we report on a quality of a learner, we must be able to assess that identified quality. This begins with a process of defining the quality and having a transparent and accountable process for the development of the quality in the learner over time.
In traditional educational institutions, the academic year is punctuated by semester reports, in June and again in December. However, it is in the spaces between those milestones, that I believe the real stories are revealed. At Brisbane Girls Grammar School, we embed formative assessment into every lesson, for every student, across every year level.
The staff we employ are highly skilled subject specialists and they are not asked to teach outside of their field of expertise. As such, sitting behind semester reports is individualised, continuous reporting in each of the student’s subjects, along a timeline not punctuated by semesters, but which begins on day one of Year 7, and continues without interruption, until her final day in Year 12.
If we flung open our doors and allowed access to those beyond the white picket fence, the intricate and sophisticated flow of communication between the expert learners and the expert curators in our classrooms would be revealed. Our teachers move fluidly, facilitating the development of soft and hard skills within their disciplines. However, they have never been asked to report on character, or the values that define a Girls Grammar valedictorian, for example, as an incremental process uncoupled from the student’s academic record. The current mechanism to report on these qualities is in the form of a testimonial at the end of Year 12.
Winston Churchill once said, ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’. In a school setting, it is our education mindset that is shaped in part by our existing educational ‘institution’.
Increasingly, those of us who teach are seeing education as an under-utilised source of extraordinary power.
Education is in the futures business in that it is responsible for preparing students to live successfully in the future, however success is defined. But it should not be about preparing them to cope with the future or simply wait for the arrival of the future. It should be preparing them to proactively create the future (McTighe & Curtis, 2015).
I like to envisage a world where every member of tomorrow’s workforce is systematically curious, creative and imaginative; a place where well-educated and well-informed, self-reflective problem solvers are light on ego.
As educators, our priority is to help our girls to navigate their way there. Tracking student development across these qualitative areas is critical. Formal semester reporting, agile and continuous adaptive teaching and learning, and defining and developing discrete virtues to build and practise character development, are three ways to achieve this.
While this is easy to describe in theory, it must be devised, lived and breathed every day in our classrooms, and is achieved when our teachers plan lessons that consistently demand their students to think. Low-performing and high-performing students grow in this high-expectations environment because we all must learn to think for ourselves.
By introducing and using processes such as Design Thinking and other achievement-forming habits, and by practising sitting in ambiguity without rushing to the prototype, provides opportunities to develop those critical soft skills. In addition, avoiding the temptation to focus on the fastest, least-engaged, straightest path to the right answer, helps build character.
Importantly, when we broaden and deepen the value set of reportable qualities in a longitudinal way, it helps us to breach the gap between those who are deemed high performers at school, and high performers in ‘life’. There are too many factors in one’s life beyond school to ever make this capable of being either a direct correlation, or a tool of predictive value, but school should be geared for success and achievement, just as it is in life.
At Girls Grammar we work hard to maintain strong alumni relationships, which gives us a unique insight into how graduates with extraordinary track records of strong performance at school, use those enduring qualities and understandings to succeed in life. Interestingly, the metrics and measurement of qualities that are nurtured and determine achievement at our School are the same metrics and measurements that more broadly underpin achievement in life.
For 140 years, Girls Grammar has graduated young women who contribute confidently to the world. However, there is still much work to be done for women and by women, and we recognise the important part we play in educating the whole girl at this School. By demonstrating the qualities of an adaptive leader, by teaching adaptively, and by demanding students practise achievement-forming habits in order to learn adaptively and become expert learners, we enable our girls to look to the future, and ask more beautiful questions, intelligently, incrementally and gently.
References
McTighe, J. & Curtis, G. (2015). Leading modern learning: A blueprint for vision-driven schools.Bloomington, USA.: Solution Tree Press.
Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. New York, USA: Bloomsbury Publishing.