Teach Employability Skills
Soft Skills are Easy to Include in Lessons at Every Grade Level
Jan 15, 2009
Soft skills include concepts such as problem solving, team work and adaptability to change. These skills are not necessarily graded in a traditional sense but might be assessed with analytical rubrics. These skills may already be present in lessons and may only need to have a slight emphasis added so students see the skills’ importance.
Randall Hansen and Katharine Hansen of Quintessential Careers emphasize that employers are seeking stronger soft skills when evaluating a potential new employee. These are skills that can easily be included in lessons at every grade level. Teachers feeling overwhelmed by subject specific testing and the emphasis being placed on increasing student standardized test scores need not fear yet another difficult task.
Problem Solving
Problem solving goes beyond math skills. It is the higher order thinking necessary to find an answer. This can take the form of questions such as, “draw what you will look like when you are an adult” to “write a new ending to the given story.” In both cases students need to think critically about what they already know and then draw a conclusion before producing the requested result.
Team Work
Team work is the ability to effectively solve a problem or work within a diverse group. It requires good communication skills and the ability to both support and compromise with others.
Team work skills are best developed in group assignments where the teacher either randomly assigns team members or creates the teams so that the students are not comfortable with each other or have different strengths. This requires students to learn to work with different people of differing skill sets while trying to successfully solve a problem.
Adaptability
Being able to adapt to changes in technology and the workplace itself is critical in today’s businesses. Hansen and Hansen also describe this as the flexibility to accept new ideas and the ability to simultaneously work on multiple projects.
Ways to include adaptability in the classroom are diverse. This can be as sudden as a fire drill or unexpected snow storm. It can be taking a students knowledge about how to create a table in a text editor and teaching them to create a spreadsheet instead. It can also take place in the assigning of more than one project or taking multiple classes in middle or high school.
No matter what soft skills are included in a lesson it is important that their importance is understood by students. This can be easily achieved by providing students with an analytical rubric that will assess their ability to independently solve a problem, work effectively in a team, or adapt to a new situation or concept. Though these skills may not result in a grade, students will be exposed to the importance of soft skills and be better able to analyze their own proficiency.
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