Thinking Long-Term

So, a question:

What skills that students learn in your class do you hope they will still find useful five years after they have graduated from high school?

Let's be honest.  It won't be factoring, or solving a system of equations, or calculating a derivative by hand.  It won't be finding the symbolism in a novel or remembering the exact date of a battle from the Revolutionary War. 

Speaking for myself, the skills we focus on in my classroom are collaboration, communication,  creativity, and critical thinking.  The mathematical content of the course is merely the means through which we develop and practice those skills.  Not that the math isn't important, and not that the kids don't learn the math; it is, and they do.  However, if it takes them a little longer to become proficient with the content, that's fine, because it's an opportunity for them to work on perseverance, which will be far more useful to them in the future.  Rather than giving them all of the information they need to pass the next quiz or the next test, it is worth it to create the scaffold for them to climb as they work their way through the material, because in the process they will learn the mathematics more deeply and work on the more vital skills listed above. 

One of the issues is that so many of us focus on the short-term learning of the content rather than on the long-term learning of the 4 Cs.  Ironically, if we were to focus more on the long-term learning of the 4 Cs, the kids would actually learn the content more deeply and retain it longer. 

The question at hand is this: How do we convince teachers that focusing on the long-term is worth it?