Soft skills are all the rage right now. I'd probably even describe them as existing in that "buzzword" category. You can Google "employers soft skills" and come back with thousands of news articles about the soft skills that employers say they want to see in the 21st-century employee. What are those skills? Communication, emotional intelligence, patience, persistence, perseverance, adaptability etc.
Soft skills? More like essential skills. The name soft skills just carries too many implications of these skills being secondary or complementary skills. These aren't just skills you pair with your knowledge of website design, engineering to make yourself a more complete professional, employee or anything else. These are often times the skills that allow people to be distinguished in a crowd. They're a part of why a cool and collected Kennedy beat a sweaty-mess Nixon and why Mondale could only laugh when Reagan said he refused to exploit, for political purposes, his opponents' youth and inexperience when asked if he was too old to be President. None of the skills are revolutionary. In truth, these skills are no newer than Oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. What seems to be new is the attention they're receiving for their perceived lack of existence in today's modern world. That's where schools, and, more importantly, governing bodies that right learning standards come in. Our standards reflect words like analyze, evaluate, compare and many others taken right from Bloom's Taxonomy. The thing is, with the emphasis being so much on the Bloom's verb, little time is given to the development of these essential skills. Let's take adaptability for example. What if a course was designed so that in the middle of a really long project, we scrapped everything and started over from scratch and going in a completely different direction? Yes, I know this might cause a small (or large) explosion in the amount of email and phone calls you receive so you would want great communication (an essential skill) beforehand. But ask anyone in any professional capacity how many times this has happened to them. I bet they run out of fingers and toes to count on. We could go through countless more examples with each of these so-called "soft skills" but I think you catch my drift at this point. We need to stop marginalizing these skills by name and we need to start writing standards at the state level that reflect these skills being embedded in the learning process.
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AuthorJeff Lahey Archives
January 2020
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