With our annual Speech Day looming next week, I have been prompted to consider what we celebrate in education.
It is appropriate to celebrate student achievement, and our College has a rich history of doing this in a variety of forms and across a range of domains, both curricular and co-curricular.
Our Speech Day is our ‘day of days’, which focuses on the academic achievement of our students. However, I think in recent times the definition of ‘academic achievement’ has changed as the educational landscape has shifted. In days gone by, ‘academia’ and ‘learning’ was seen as a purely domain-specific, ‘cognitive’ process. However, recent advances in neuroscience as to how a person ‘learns’, in addition to the considerable debate over what we desire in education to best prepare our students for the modern world, have enabled us to see that successful learning is more than just cognitive.
Internationally renowned educational psychologist and researcher Angela Duckworth recently said in an interview with Edutopia:
‘It’s very clear that a human being’s worth, and more narrowly even their productivity, depends on more than their cognitive ability . . . Call it soft skills, call it social and emotional skills, call it healthy habits, call it character – whatever you want to call it – I think any educator and certainly any parent would say that we have to broaden our view of kids’ capabilities. That’s partly because students have a rainbow of capabilities, but it’s also because I don’t want to send a signal to young people that cognitive ability is the only thing that matters. It’s not. If teamwork matters, if loyalty matters, if honesty matters, if grit matters, if creativity matters, then we have to start assessing these things, because as it’s often said, what gets measured is what gets treasured.’
Duckworth’s last comment is poignant. ‘What gets measured is treasured.’ As a College, we have always had a desire to recognise at our Speech Day the ‘human’ skills that Duckworth describes above.
This year, the Senior School has introduced a new award at each year level from 7 to 11, called the Ignatian Award.
Five to six students from each year level will receive this award, which reflects our six pairs of College virtues. As a College, we ‘treasure’ these virtues. It is therefore appropriate that we measure and recognise those students who consistently live them out. Our Junior School has long had an Ignatian Award, but we have also ‘tweaked’ this so that the criteria for it reflects our Ignatian virtues. Not surprisingly, our most esteemed award at Year 12, the Gold Medal – Insignis, highlights the same set of behaviours and dispositions.
In addition to the Ignatian Award, we have for many years also awarded prizes for application and commitment to learning. This, again, highlights many of the key dispositions and behaviours that describe our virtues.
Students should never view these as ‘consolation’ prizes over a subject-specific prize because these skills, dispositions, and behaviours are essential for students to thrive in the future. As Queensland educational leader Jane Mueller states: ‘In this, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, employers are crying out for new fluencies. EQ (emotional quotient) and the CQ’s (cultural quotient, collaborative quotient, creative quotient, and curiosity quotient), are on equal standing with IQ (intelligence quotient).’
This isn’t to take away from the value of our subject-specific prizes, though. These, too, require students to demonstrate a combination of both cognitive and human fluencies.
Ultimately, we seek to ‘measure and treasure’ all that we desire in the total formation of our students.
Our Speech Day is a great celebration of the richness of learning that occurs in our College. I congratulate all our students who receive awards on the day. Furthermore, I congratulate all students, regardless of whether they win an award or not, for continuing to strive to be the best versions of themselves and to appreciate the vast ‘rainbow of capabilities’ that they have.
Mr Kain Noack
Head of Studies and Innovation, St Ignatius College, SA
Reprinted with permission from the St Ignatius’ College newsletter