The Long Win Is More Important Than Grades, Medals And Rankings

Roll out the prize-winners! Who is the star pupil? Which school is top of the league tables? It’s like a mini-Olympics. But what have grades, prizes and rankings actually got to do with education?

In sport, athletes, performance directors and coaches are starting to realise that athletes need a broader framework and purpose within which to situate their aims to win. There is a parallel need to rethink the broader framework and purpose of education within which exams and assessments sit.

The lure of metrics across society, from business to politics, sport to education sees schools inevitably side-tracked by rankings and league tables and comparisons at all levels. Teachers, government ministers and parents pore over tightly measured outcomes. Yet few of these are underpinned by the deeper purpose of education. How far do any of these measure a pupil’s love of learning, development of thinking or deeper understanding of our world? Let alone prepare pupils for the complex challenges that lie ahead in their adult lives. It’s time to refocus education on constant learning, rather than constant measuring.

Although there is a greater focus on ‘standards’ of education than ever before, we have allowed these extrinsic measures – gold stars, marks and rankings – to distract us from deeper and more sustainable intrinsic sources of motivation to fuel how we learn.

Psychologist Daniel Pink sets out in ‘Drive’ the three key elements that comprise effective motivation: Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery. Our obsession with measuring has moved us away from all three in education.

What drives effective motivation?

Schooling has become less about exploring what you are interested in or fascinated by, and more about following the curriculum, with increasing rigidity. Pupils who want to research a different period of history than is in the curriculum would never be allowed to do that during core time, it’s unthinkable. I have always found it puzzling that people in Great Britain have learnt the same bits of British history: we usually know about the Vikings and the Romans, the Tudors and the Stuarts, and of course, Oliver Cromwell.

But mention an event in British history tens of years either side of those periods, and no-one knows anything. Nor is there much diversity in what is studied within those periods, such as the role of women in society.

There remains an emphasis on political and military battles, wars and heroes, kings and queens. It makes no sense when across a country we could have collectively studied the whole of British history and together bring multiple perspectives on it. Instead, when we pool our knowledge, we all know the same stuff. It’s a demonstration of how we might be ‘individually intelligent but collectively stupid’ as Matthew Syed explains in ‘Rebel Ideas’.

In more progressive school systems, initiative, self-evaluation and choice play a much larger role. Technology exists to make it ever easier. Pupils in history classes in the Netherlands are able to choose which period of history they learn about, and which aspect of history they might focus on with that. This inclusion of autonomy and choice into the learning experience provides a huge boost to pupils’ intrinsic motivation. This then increases the creativity that they bring to the experience as they approach it with the curiosity of the world’s first explorers, rather than as compliant learning machines.

A return to a constant learning approach, rather than peaks and troughs organised around exams, would also nurture more of a ‘mastery’ mindset. This way of thinking would be of great help throughout life, not just for the period of time required to pass exams. A ‘mastery’ orientation teaches a focus on improving from one day to the next, comparing ourselves with ourselves, not our peers, and enabling us to much less reliant on external markers of success. None of this is about lowering standards, quite the opposite: it’s how to create a sustainable approach to lasting levels of performance.

The Olympic approach – small improvements every day

It’s an approach adopted by Olympic athletes who know that in order to maximise their chances of winning when the big competitions come, they need to become world-class at improving on a daily basis. They become focused on small, incremental daily wins and celebrating personal bests. Although athletes have to operate and survive in a world defined by external measures (medals, world rankings), sports psychologists work with athletes to develop a mastery mindset in order to sustain high performance.

The whole concept of being in ‘flow’ or ‘in the zone’ during a sporting performance requires the athlete to concentrate fully on the present moment and let go of all thoughts of the outcome. In other words, trying to win requires an athlete to think less about winning. This is a concept that could helpfully be applied into the educational world: in order to learn, it would be helpful to think less about exam grades.

Athletes also learn that losing races often brings the greatest learning and accept it as essential and unavoidable. But the same approach is rarely adopted towards school exams. An athlete’s career typically features a number of losses which are seen as critical building blocks to later success. In education, the opposite interpretation may be applied. Once you do poorly in exams, that can often be seen as a cast-iron predictor of your ability and of how future exams are likely to go – it’s much harder to break out of that stereotyping, which can quickly become self-fulfilling.

A constant learning mindset based on a broader purpose of learning rather than passing exams would enable us to value more diverse aspects of our educational gains beyond grades. Valuing diversity is the opposite of what a rigid assessment system produces. Exams and tests rarely reward ‘divergent thinking’ i.e. coming up with multiple options and solutions to issues, and usually require ‘convergent thinking’ i.e. one single answer that can be summarized on a marking sheet.

We need to stop and question the purpose of education – is it really about passing exams? Or is there something more fundamental, exciting and ambitious that we could achieve? If so, then we might start to recognise learning to think in different ways, love language and numbers, not get pulled into simplistic categories of subject categories and labelling, learn to unpick puzzles and design new ones, and spend lots of time on complex issues to which there is no known solution.

Our adult lives certainly do not work on a right/wrong basis. As the pandemic showed us more than ever, we need to be able to adapt, think creatively on our feet and collaborate with others in new and innovative ways. And as AI increasingly takes over straightforward and predictable work, it’s even more critical for us to focus on where we can add the greatest value, typically in areas requiring creativity, ideas, relationships, and diverse ways of thinking.

A series of experiments

Psychologists Teresa Amabile and Beth Hennessey conducted a series of experiments to explore which aspects of an education system kill creativity. They came up with the following:

· Having children work for an expected reward

· Focusing pupils on an expected evaluation

· Deploying extensive surveillance

· Setting up restricted choices

· Creating competitive situations

Sadly, each of these is a dominant characteristic in many of our schools. Many are visible in the workplace too with similarly limiting consequences.

Sports psychology has proven that when athletes get obsessed by results, they take the focus off the performance process. In education, when focusing on results, teachers and pupils inevitably focus less on the learning process. The aim becomes focused on the mark at the end – not about thinking differently or exploring new perspectives and experimenting with new ways of doing things. The system teaches a shallow and short-term ‘learn in order to get a mark’ rather than learn in order to deepen your understanding and grow your mind.

As rankings pit students against each other, they also destroy the opportunity to learn with and from our peers. Educational expert Alfie Kohn’s research shows that ‘cooperative learning’ is the most effective way to learn. But rankings create a competitive educational approach that inhibits collaboration and reinforces the message that for one pupil to win, another must lose.

The experience at schools is one of pupils working largely alone and nearly always being assessed individually. That is quite unhelpful for what’s to come as most organizations require teamwork and the ability to work collaboratively to tackle complex issues and social challenges from climate change to global health, inequality to security – noone is going to solve any of these issues or find ways to move forwards by thinking really hard on their own and using only what they themselves know.

The competitive approach to education also puts huge and constant pressure on pupils’ self-esteem. As Alfie Kohn explains, ‘The desire to be better than others feels quite different from this desire to do well. There is something inherently compensatory about it. One wants to outdo in order to make up for an impression… of personal inadequacy… one wants to be stronger or smarter than others in order to convince oneself at some level that one is a good person.’

This is where our obsession with grades, prizes and rankings is perhaps most pernicious – in attacking our mental health and creating a threat-based educational experience based on a fear of failing. Failure is so essential to learning and a critical building block to success. It is one of the most essential human experiences we can have growing up and throughout our adult lives. Yet the spirit of success through failure has become strangely absent in many schools, or worse, the point is missed or manipulated.

There is an accepted narrative which includes a limited amount of failure, in a restricted way and certainly not when it matters in exams. But failure doesn’t work like that in life. All too often, top athletes and successful business leaders are written about in the media and invited into schools to reaffirm this narrative: their stories involve a few challenges along the way but the emphasis is on the fact that these then lead to brilliant outcomes or glorious victories. Any hardships along the way are justified by the outcome.

Dangerously misleading

But our life experiences won’t always follow that model. There are top-class talented athletes who experience failure, and however hard they try, don’t come home with an Olympic medal for a whole host of reasons, many beyond their control. And that should be ok. But we tend not to hear their stories, or worse, shy away from them, maybe even judging them for not trying hard enough or being talented enough. But this is a dangerously misleading narrative.

I remember being naively shocked to realize for myself during the decade I trained as an Olympic rower that there were people who didn’t win a medal, never won a medal, yet who defined everything that I valued in an Olympian. Some were incredibly talented and simply better, but their time wasn’t right – an ill-timed injury or moment of luck with the opposing side in a crucial game can alter that in a second. But I think their worth should not be judged solely on medals, they have a much more powerful story to tell. Then you see athletes who win a medal yet don’t uphold the values, but the timing was right for them, major opponents made a mistake or fell out injured and things fell into place. When we start to value one significantly more than the other due to the medals, due to the results and outcomes that were not fully within their control, we start to uphold some pretty shallow values.

Business thinker Simon Sinek describes in The Infinite Game how the military academy at West Point has changed its approach to leadership training, moving right away from outcomes. It fully accepts that a poor leader can achieve successful mission outcomes, and brilliant leaders can lead failed missions. It would be madness not to. What matters is how they turn up, how they lead and motivate those around them, how they take the learning from one mission into the next. The same approach could transform education.

For there are those who do well in exams who aren’t able to remember that knowledge or use it in a way to benefit others; and there are those who do terribly in our exam system, who are brilliant at thinking outside the box, at getting the most from those around them and seeing possibilities for progress in the most challenging of times. I know which ones I’d like on my team, and I’d love our schools to be allowed to start recognising the ultimate life-long prize of learning something new every day, whether it’s on an exam paper or not: this is where ‘the long win’ in education lies, if we can be bold enough to explore the possibilities.

Dr Cath Bishop is an Olympian, former diplomat and business coach. She competed in rowing at 3 Olympic Games, winning World Championships gold in 2003 and Olympic silver in Athens 2004. As a diplomat for the British Foreign Office for 12 years, Cath specialized in policy and negotiations on conflict issues, with postings to Bosnia and Iraq. Cath now works as a business consultant, leadership coach and author, and teaches on Executive Education programmes at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University and is a Visiting Professor at Surrey Business School.