Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Soft Skills

It's common at this point to hear that we should be teaching the "4 Cs" in our classrooms: critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.  These are sometime referred to as "soft skills", as compared to the "hard skills" that are more content-driven. 

However, many teachers shy away from emphasizing let alone teaching the soft skills, despite their importance.  Why?  Because the soft skills are harder to teach and harder to assess.  It's easy to check to see if a student can factor or find a derivative.  It's easier to tell kids exactly what they need to memorize and then check to make sure they've memorized it.  And I'm sorry, but the contrived word problems in math books don't count as evidence of critical thinking.  Most of the time teachers emphasize particular "types" of word problems, and the kids just memorize the key words and the process involved in solving them.  Critical thinking and creativity play no role in the solution of these problems, collaboration plays no role in memorizing the solution process required by the teacher, and the only communication expected is using proper mathematical notation. 

It's way more difficult to check to see if a student can creatively solve a complex exercise, especially since "creativity" may not strike during the allotted 50 minutes of an in-class assessment.  As anyone who has done any kind of research will tell you, days or weeks can go by without any progress being made.  Does that mean the researcher doesn't know how to think critically or that they aren't creative?  Of course not. It means that patience and perseverance are part of the package.

Patience and perseverance are also required if we expect the students to develop their critical thinking and creativity through collaboration.  As teachers, we need to get comfortable with working with the kids as they struggle through the material, and abandon the idea of delivering the material to them in nice, neat, lesson-sized pieces.  The struggle is less stressful if the kids work together, and in the process they practice the real communication skills they will need in the future.  It may seem like it takes longer, but there is still plenty of time to cover the content if we use it to work on the soft skills.

As teachers, we need to stop doing what's convenient and start doing what's important.  We need to stop focusing exclusively on the content, and start using the content to help the kids develop the soft skills.  In the long run, the soft skills will be more useful to the kids than the vast majority of the content we are required to teach them.  It can happen, and in fact it is happening in lots of classrooms.  The only question is whether or not we are willing to put in the time necessary to creating a classroom environment where all the students comfortably embrace the patience and perseverance needed to develop these soft skills. 

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