What about those soft skills?

For almost all of our life skills, we have all failed and failed a good number of times to get to the points we are in today. For failure to be a positive part of the growth model, there must be some reflection and revision after each failure. Far too often we observe adult learners fail at something and then continue to fail at that same thing because there was never a revision in the approach. I put part of the blame on generations of education that promote one "way" or a correct process one must used in a specific condition. I would also question how many environments our young adults, especially in the 20s, have ever been in charge of making decisions. For almost 10 years now, parents have worked so hard to remove failure from kids lives. The kids can't go out and play by themselves because they might get hurt. The kids can't even choose who to play with because there might be bullies. Kids are not allowed unstructured free time, because there is a fear a kid might get bored. There are so many other examples of how a decade of parental restrictions has now created adults that are ill prepared to deal with every day life failures that surround us. 

As we focus on the content areas of STEM, we need to also create environments in which STEM thinking is going on. In so many lecture based classrooms, there is almost no possibility of failure because the student is hardly processing anything other than listening to a teacher talk. In STEM environments, participants are constantly asking questions, testing hypothesis, reflecting on results, processing results to further come up with other questions... In short, if we wish students to actively display soft skills, we must have environments in which students can develop skills like empathy, persistence, communication, and flexibility of thinking. We, like so many parents over the last few decades, continue to create these soft bubbles of instruction in which failure and exploration are almost non existent. With the instruction being driven by teachers so much, the learning process becomes passive and learners effectively don't have room to explore. 

As teachers, we have so much power to ask just the right question that helps a learner find success. We may set a stage, we may set up resources to explore and we may even help with goal setting and evaluation of progress, but much of the educational driving needs to be in the learners' hands in order for productive little failures to happen and for learning from those failures to be possible. I have been experimenting with classes in terms of what specific elements I control and which elements learners are in control of and I feel I have been learning much on the topic that I was not aware of before. Have others been finding success in different ways that help bring out those soft skills Kathy highlighted?

Glad to see this important conversation. In fact, there is nothing at all "soft" about these skills, so I tend to refer to them as employability, life, or non-cognitive skills. WIOA refers to them as workforce preparation. Wish we could create a better term, though, than "soft skills", which implies that they are somehow easier to learn and less critical.

When I was managing a job training and placement program, I placed students into full-time positions with benefits following a training program, which fully incorporated employability and life skills preparation. We ran our program like on-the-job training. Students were expected to attend every day and be on time, and also wear professional dress. (Yes, we did a LOT of work to help students put professional dress in place.)

I can't count the number of employers who cared more about professionalism than technical skills. They would always say, "I can teach someone how to do the technical part of this job, but I can't teach them to show up every day on time and how to interact with customers and colleagues in a professional, respectful manner. Either they get it or they don't. Doesn't matter how great their skills are if they aren't here to do the work or if they aren't capable of working as part of a team."

I've been lucky to do training around these skills in response to the awareness that we have to do a better job in preparing our learners for ALL of the expectations they will face in postsecondary education and in employment. Typically, we have many learners with different goals and purposes for being in our classes; however the skills they need to be successful aren't at all different, regardless of their next steps. Is being punctual really all that different if you're showing up for a final exam or an important meeting? Isn't it valuable to be able to research multiple options and make the best choice whether we're talking about picking a college, picking a company to work for, or buying a car?

My students would always get frustrated when I returned to them as incomplete a sample report or business letter with 97% accuracy and tell them they had to fix their mistakes. They felt great to get an "A", until I explained to them that no one in the business world cares about "A"s. That letter would be called "trash" because only a letter with no errors at all would be acceptable. That's a good example of the difference between the standards we tend to set in our classrooms vs. the standards they'll experience in the workplace and the shift we need to help our learners make in their thinking and in their practice.

Students benefit when we allow them to practice these skills in the relative safety of our adult ed classrooms, where the opportunity to fail and learn from those mistakes has low-risk. For example, setting a 90% attendance expectation will help students figure out what they need to put into place like backup child care. While this is challenging for many adult learners given the demands on their time, the truth is that 90% attendance at work (equivalent to missing 1/2 day each week) will get them fired. Helping them to understand the expectations and plan for meeting them will benefit every adult learner, regardless of where they go after they leave us.

Most importantly, learners who have realistic expectations and the opportunity to practice the skills they'll need to be successful will have the capacity and confidence to navigate whatever comes next on their journeys. 

Luanne