Redefining examination success and failure
This soggy summer is passing quickly: A Level results are published tomorrow and GCSE results next week. At a nervous moment for students and their families, I feel apprehensive too. This is partly, of course, because I feel a significant sense of responsibility for my students and the work that we have done together. August is always a month of accountability for secondary teachers and tutors. More than this, though, my anxiety is rooted in the knowledge of all the ways that these exam outcomes matter.
In immediate and practical terms, the grades achieved in public examinations either enable a student’s next academic steps or limit their progress. With a certain number of GCSE grades at levels 4-9, Year 11 students can take up a place at school or college to study for A Levels, T Levels, or BTEC qualifications. Two years later, results in these assessments determine a student’s choices when they leave secondary education. As an example, a student wanting to study engineering at university will need - on average - to achieve A Level grades at BCC or BTEC grades of DMM (Distinction, Merit, Merit).
More holistically, however, these grades play a dynamic and dangerous role in defining a student’s sense of success and failure. And with these concepts in mind - and while teetering on the brink of results season - I am contemplating blots and smudges as I order a new hardback exercise book for the beginning of my university term. At this stage, I should make two things clear: despite living in an era of digital technologies for learning, artificial intelligence, and word-processed everything, I am (still) a huge fan of the humble exercise book. I am also profoundly suspicious of anyone who insists on rigid neatness in students’ work.
Exercise books, at their very best, are scuffed and dog-eared; they bulge with notes, errors and amendments. In this form, they are incredibly powerful representations of what it means to learn because they demonstrate how progress is shaped by consistent effort day after day, week in and week out. Exercise books allow students to show their workings and I love to see the lumpy-bumpy nature of learning embodied in doodles, scribbles, annotations and crossings-out.
The problem with beautifully presented essays is that justified margins and spell-checked sentences do not reveal the process that made the work. This is why I like to see how students shape their thoughts and why I am happy to show them my own exercise books where I develop my thinking in waves of ideas, revisions, annotations and thought-bubbles. In the last few years, I have generated a stack of exercise books during my MA and in the early phases of my PhD thinking, which has just spilled into a second volume, full of wonky doodles in felt-tip with bursts of highlighter to record revelations and urgent questions. As my thinking develops, my work - inevitably - evolves into Word documents and online folders supported by referencing software but my exercise books remind me that success and failure are not, in fact, binary opposites.
For neatness-afficionados, exercise book ‘success’ might look tidy, linear, mono-colour, dated and underlined. Exercise book ‘failure’, by contrast, could be all scribbles and scrawly mess. And yet neatness might be empty nonsense while spidery doodles represent the growth of sharp thinking and deep learning.
We can track similar patterns throughout a young person’s education. Success is too easily defined by high marks and friction-free progression through educational stages, and failure by low marks and difficulties with both progress and assessment. And yet both of these definitions are clumsy and superficial and it is vital that we, as educators, work with our students to develop more nuanced and sensitive understandings of these twin gremlins: success and failure.
Hard as it is, we have to start with context. I have sat in academic evaluation meetings in which student progress is discussed without reference to their personal circumstances and current wellbeing. If students are marked in red on a spreadsheet then context is critical if we are to understand obstacles to learning. Most obviously, a young person who experiences adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) may learn at a different rate and in a different manner from a youngster who has benefited from safe, gentle family support. This does not mean that we should operate different expectations for students but we must be alert to the ways that circumstances affect learning.
It can, however, be difficult to discuss context with students because acronyms like ACE and SEND are often intimidating and alienating. It is usually much more effective to focus on the immediate. So a student who is shuttling between newly separated parents can be reassured that low marks in a series of science tests are the result of their subject folders being in different houses rather than evidence of a sudden lapse in knowledge.
We can also acknowledge that concepts of success and failure are often shaped by a student’s family culture. Some young people are brought up to concentrate on skill-acquisition and progression to paid work rather than generating student debt en route to a university degree. Several of my recent students have been promised cash-gifts or driving lessons if they achieve GCSE grades at 7-9; others have been told that good exams results are nice but that nothing matters more than their happiness and well-being.
As educators, we can challenge rigid definitions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in order to protect students from the damage wrought by brittle concepts. In English, for instance, students can choose their own target score in a spelling test so that ‘success’ is properly differentiated. To give three imaginary examples: Sarah has auditory processing issues so choosing the correct spelling of the word ‘there’ in a sentence that involves distance (‘that goal post over there’) is an absolute triumph. Her chosen target is 10/15. Meanwhile Alex hates spelling tests because they challenge his short-term working memory, letter sequencing, and writing speed so he sets his target at 4/15. And Yasmin grimaces while setting her target at 14/15 because she experiences feelings of panic if she achieves less than full marks and this is an experiment that we have agreed together.
Students experience hundreds of these micro-challenges in the course of a school term and if we negotiate such moments with imagination and kindness then we can begin to soften the edges of success and failure. To do this, we have to acknowledge that the stakes are incredibly high for young people during adolescence. It is not fair to ask students undergoing huge changes (emotional, psychological, cognitive and physical) to apply perspective to their experiences. Perspective only comes through re-shaping our understanding with the benefit of hindsight. To do this, we have to live long enough to generate successive experiences of hindsight. We can, however, encourage teenagers to see achievement as a process that naturally involves recalculations, adjustments, amended timescales and plenty of setbacks.
This is not easy or straightforward work, especially when social media curates narrow examples of perceived success and failure on a twenty-four hour cycle. But while the noise of the online world can be overwhelming, role models can be fantastically helpful. In the last few days, Simone Biles has forfeited one Olympic gold by slipping off the beam but her professionalism as she completed her routine with precision and poise demonstrated that success comes in more than one shape.
In my own practice, I work to loosen students’ concepts of success and failure by encouraging them to be compassionate to themselves. I discussed perfectionism in an earlier blog but it is important to reiterate that young people with fragile and evolving identities can be savagely critical of their progress and abilities. From the vantage point of adulthood, I know that learning to be kinder to ourselves while maintaining high standards is a lifetime’s work but teachers and tutors plays a vital part in this process. As I write, I am thinking in particular of a young man who will receive his GCSE English Language re-take grade in a week’s time. With his heart set on medical school, he berated himself for only starting his revision six weeks before the exam itself. I didn’t want to brush over his self-recrimination or dismiss it. But I did tell him that he had shown tremendous courage and determination in finding a tutor, asking his parents for funding, and in committing to revision sessions every other day in order to boost his chances of achieving the all important level 6.
If we focus on binary notions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ then we overlook achievements like this student’s tremendous effort and it is vital that we tell young people how we are inspired by their energy and commitment, regardless of examination outcomes.
