Why Teach Soft Skills?

What are the soft skills? These are the attributes that individuals need to handle life successfully on a day to day basis. Sociologists refer to them as the EQ: Emotional Intelligence Quotient. While there is no one complete set of soft skills, some of the more frequently cited ones are: teamwork and collaboration, communication skills, flexibility, problem solving, perseverance, and decision making.

In today's classrooms there is a greater focus on the hard skills i.e. Reading, writing and math than ever before. With this hyper focus and determination to raise test scores, one could argue educating the whole child has been deemed less important.

Employers may beg to differ.

According to Burning Glass Technologies, one in every three skills listed in job ads is a baseline skill. Baseline skills are transferable to any job; in other words the soft skills. In a Career Builder survey 77% of employers surveyed said they were seeking candidates with soft skills.

So while schools may be doing a better job of teaching the hard skills, it is clear job candidates are not fully prepared to enter the workforce.

That's where today's classroom teachers can help. Clearly the three R's are still important. But by acknowledging the soft skills are the glue which keeps a person together, a teacher can commit to developing their students' EQ while they are ripe for developing.

Which ones should a teacher focus on? We suggest selecting the soft skills that occur in a natural state in a classroom: Communication skills, flexibility and problem solving.

Here are some strategies to implement them in your classroom.

Communication skills

This covers a rather large swath of skills but in this context let's focus on oral communication skills. Teachers residing in Common Core states are familiar with the "Speaking and Listening" strand under language arts. When students work collaboratively wonderful things can happen. Synergy can come alive and new ideas can evolve. Unfortunately when students work collaboratively disagreements can occur too. Loud disagreements. Encourage the combatants to take turns speaking and using an in-door voice. It's an old saying but one worth repeating: teach the students it's okay to disagree, just do it in an agreeable way.

Flexibility

Students with ADHD and or other learning differences can be dealt a blow if the schedule changes unpredictably. Those who have spent any time in a classroom know fire drills, indoor recess and a cancelled guest speaker are common events. Provide opportunities for students to practice their flexibility. For example, during a lesson purposely change one of the requirements. It could be as simple as asking the students to change their name on the paper from the top right to the top left of the paper. If you have an evil streak, you could alter the rules to a game your class loves to play during recess.

Problem solving

When students hear "problem solving" they usually recoil in mock horror knowing a math word problem is coming their way. But we are not talking about that type. We are referring to the Thomas Edison variety. Thomas Edison said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Science class provides wonderful opportunities for students to practice their inner Edison's. Rather than focus on (and accept) one good answer to a question, challenge the students to come up with as many different responses as they can. How many ways can the class come up with to reduce the amount of wasted paper in their classroom? What type of paper airplane flies the best? Provide lots of open-ended questions for students to practice their problem solving skills.