Vanessa Mee, professional development and scholarly activity lead at The Guernsey Institute, was awarded a technical teaching fellowship by the Education and Training Foundation last year after her initial research into what skills employers thought education-leavers were lacking when joining the workforce.
She learned that the skills that most employers in the island wanted to see were around collaboration and communication, and they felt that the skills of students were not as good as they used to be.
‘When you hear that, you wonder what it actually means, whether we’re not doing enough or expectations are off,’ she said.
‘I wanted to pick at a thread and learn how we could better prepare students, particularly given we are in the fifth industrial revolution.
‘At the moment, we’re at such a pivotal point where we’ve got AI coming in, we’ve got hybrid working, we’ve got a globalisation effect where some young people might be living in Guernsey but working for a global company.’
Ms Mee said that the young people coming out of college generally were highly skilled, but could be lacking in other areas.
When she discovered how important collaboration skills were to employers, she developed a model from project-based learning and encouraged staff to integrate projects into students’ work.
‘We’re told all the time, that our students’ jobs don’t exist yet, and then we feel quite shackled to the content of what we teach and wonder if we’re teaching in old-fashioned ways, or whether we need to find new ways of delivering that better prepares the students,’ she said.
‘Some areas do it so naturally, such as performing arts, putting on a show is a project, whereas other areas they do their assignments and prepare for exams, so it’s about finding opportunities across all subjects for collaborative projects to take place.’
As teachers, she said it was a challenge to fit extra projects into the curriculum, but generally staff felt confident to find a balance and incorporate projects.
Off the back of her initial research, she was awarded the fellowship.
Now, she is still interested into employability skills, but her research has developed into looking at resilience.
‘I was trying to encourage staff to work on increasing students’ resilience, but they weren’t feeling resilient themselves, so I realised I needed to take a step back and actually work with staff,’ said Ms Mee.
‘My project at the moment is called “professional plasticity” which is about being malleable in your job and responding to things, not letting things bother you and being able to cope and regulate the stresses that come with the workplace.
‘The idea is that staff take away the skills and techniques and work with their students, it’s that cliche of putting your own lifejacket on before you help others with theirs.’
Ms Mee spoke at a ‘Make it Happen’ event in Guernsey earlier this year, an event for local researchers to share their work.
‘I’m finding at the moment I’m constantly in the UK, or doing webinars, so the fact there’s something now on-island is really encouraging,’ she said.
‘It started off with me wondering whether we were teaching students the right way and it just keeps evolving. I don’t know what it will look like this time next year.’
Her work has also taken her further afield, discussing her research with other thought leaders in further education at the House of Commons.