21st Century Learning and Teaching

As the world fills with more sophisticated AI and ubiquitous technology, human skills--compassion, empathy, etc.--will define the competitive edge of workers and entire organizations. So those interested in thriving in a high-tech world must put renewed prioritization on emotional intelligence and soft skills.


Soft skills represent the top three missing skills of job applicants according to the Society of Human Resource Management's (SHRM) 2019 State of the Workplace.

Top 6 Missing Skills in Job Applicants

Problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation, and creativity (37 percent)

Ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity (32 percent)

Communication (31 percent)

Trade skills (carpentry, plumbing, welding, machining, etc.) (31 percent)

Data analysis / Data science (20 percent)

Science / Engineering / Medical (18 percent)

The significance of developing and applying social and emotional skills is growing. Soft skills are twice as predictive of a student's academic achievement as home environment and demographics and 30-40 percent of jobs in growth industries require soft skills. Additionally, 57 percent of leaders say soft skills are more important than hard skills.

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We see a post on social media, read an article in the paper, listen to opinions in a meeting, hear the results of a poll, and before you know it, we adjust our views and jump on the bandwagon with everyone else. It’s as if we say, “If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.” No questions asked. Groupthink: what makes you think others know better?

We are dramatically affected by the people around us. In fact, we tend to do things simply because others do them, rather than follow our own beliefs or think for ourselves. That’s fine if we’re kind, eat healthy, or read more because our friends and colleagues influence us to act that way. But this phenomenon can also compel us to do things against our own best interest — if we’re not careful.

Even though being part of a group provides comfort and security it doesn’t guarantee that your group will always think intelligently; in fact, their reasoning may be deeply flawed. That’s why you should think carefully before you end up destroying your credibility and your reputation. It’s important to consider whether the messenger is credible, the information is accurate, the rationale is logical, and the intentions are honorable.

The alternative is to follow the group blindly — and assume that other members did their homework.

When your ears hear one thing, but your eyes see another…use your brain.

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The Washington Post recently reported on a 2013 Google study of its hiring, firing, and promotion data since 1998. The study, called Project Oxygen, shockingly concluded that “among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last.”

So, what came out on top? “The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.”

The soft skills valued by employers are byproducts of foreign language acquisition.

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What are Soft Skills?

The phrase ‘soft skills’ is often used to describe the skills which characterise relationships with other people, or which are about how you approach life and work.

Others phrases that are often used for these types of skills include: ‘people skills’, ‘interpersonal skills’, ‘social skills’ or ‘transferable skills’.

‘Hard skills’, by contrast, is a phrase usually used to describe job-specific skills. Examples of such skills include professional skills like bricklaying or accountancy, medical expertise such as diagnosis and treatment, or other skills that can be taught and whose presence is testable through exams.

Ironically, for many people, the so-called soft skills are often some of the hardest skills to develop.
The Relative Importance of Hard and Soft Skills
Job-related expertise is essential in any profession and in many other careers. However, over the last twenty to thirty years, understanding has grown that perhaps the soft skills may ultimately be more important in determining levels of success.

That is, the hard skills are a basic minimum necessary in order to operate in that particular workplace. Whether or not you are successful in your career may depend on how you relate to other people and to work: the so-called soft skills.

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Soft skills to help your career hit the big time
You’d be hard-pressed to find professional skills that matter more than these.

You’ve got a reputation for being the best coder/editor/mechanic/whatever, but it amounts to little if you don’t work well with others. Some of the most important professional skills for workers and employers alike simply can’t be taught in a classroom or measured on paper. These traits are called soft skills and they’re more crucial to your job search and overall career than you think.

What are soft skills?
Unlike hard skills, which can be proven and measured, soft skills are intangible and difficult to quantify. Some examples of soft skills include analytical thinking, verbal and written communication, and leadership.

Research from the Society for Human Resource Management found that employers actually care more about soft skills than they do technical abilities like reading comprehension and mathematics.

One reason soft skills are so revered is that they help facilitate human connections. “Soft skills are key to building relationships, gaining visibility, and creating more opportunities for advancement,” says Kathy Robinson, founder of Boston career-coaching firm TurningPoint.

Basically, you can be the best at what you do, but if your soft skills aren’t cutting it, you’re limiting your chances of career success. Read on to learn which soft skills are critical to have firmly under your belt and what steps you can take to acquire them.

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Communication matters. While a few words can make someone feel special, words poorly chosen have the power to kill a relationship or tarnish a reputation.

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Every day, it seems, we’re bombarded with news of leaders, corporate heads, politicians and other key figures in our society whose behavior shocks and deeply disappoints us.

Whether it’s egregious lying, or a lack of accountability, or rampant narcissism or indifference to others, we’re reminded daily of how important character is in our lives and in the successes (or failures) we create and achieve.

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http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Character

Empathy is systemically related to all of the abilities on the compass, particularly to self-awareness at "true south." Research suggests that the more children become aware of themselves, the better they become at understanding others. Volumes have been written about how to teach empathy, and there is still much to learn. In an excellent article from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, author Roman Krznaric, Ph.D., claims that highly empathetic people:

Cultivate curiosity about strangers

Challenge prejudices and discover commonalities

Gain direct experience of other people's lives

Listen and open themselves to others

Inspire mass action and social change

Develop an ambitious imagination

All of these behaviors foster personal growth and lifelong learning while contributing to the growth of society, particularly empathy's role in inspiring social change.

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A smart and witty illustration from @simonheath1 summarising Dr. Martyn Newman’s 10 Leadership Skills that are fundamental to successful emotionally intelligent leaders. The 10 skills are measured by RocheMartin’s ECR Report which we use extensively in our Leadership Development programmes at Sheffield Business School.

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Power skills, durable skills, human skills, people skills, durable skills, E.Q.: Whatever you want to call them, they’re in big demand now. But, as employers scramble to hire enough high-E.Q. people (including new college grads), and launch massive efforts to instill “power skills” in vast numbers of the employees they’ve already got, one question leaps to mind: Can these skills be taught?

It matters. As companies grapple with digitization, automation, and constant change, creating a culture where people can communicate their ideas is crucial to competitiveness. So are collaboration and creative thinking.

Meanwhile, for employees, as more and more tasks are taken over by algorithms, durable skills are becoming a kind of career insurance. Studies show that people with both technical expertise and strong human skills not only have their pick of jobs these days, but they earn far higher salaries too.

But it’s hard to tell if human skills training helps people change aspects of their personality—being resistant to new experiences, or having tone-deaf social skills, for instance. At the moment, no one has yet come up with a standard way to assess those skills before and after training.

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Part of the challenge facing educationalists is that technological change will call for skills that fall outside of age-old approaches to curriculum design and teaching. Emotional intelligence, creative thinking, and collaboration are just three core aptitudes that will be needed, but which cannot easily be taught in a traditional classroom environment.

“Updating curriculum should always be on the agenda,” says Jaime Saavedra of the World Bank, quoted in the WEFFI report. “But it is incredibly urgent to invest in changing the behaviour of teachers and improving what happens inside the classroom.

THINKING CLASSROOM PHILOSOPHY IN 4 QUESTIONS

What ?

Teach learners how to think and learn Discover, value and use learners' strengths and interests
Combine the best new educational practices with the best traditional ones
Build and enrich learning relationships
Develop growth mindset characteristics and grit

Why ?

Because learners need knowledge, flexible skills and grit to succeed
Because future economic & life success depends on skills and creativity
Because everyone learns in a unique way
Because education must continually prepare learners for an exciting but uncertain future
Because of Article 13a, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

How ?

By continually increasing the effectiveness of teaching
By teaching for character as well as content
By valuing each learner for what they do well
By educating for skills, character and values as well as knowledge
By preparing learners for their futures not our pasts
By valuing, supporting and resourcing all educators

What if...

All learners were engaged, excited and interested in their lessons?
'School' evolved to match different lifestyles and different learning styles?
Teachers had time to enjoy their profession and real opportunities to thrive?
There was only one initiative and it was called "Learning"?

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http://peterliljedahl.com/wp-content/uploads/Building-Thinking-Classrooms-Feb-14-20151.pdf

If you define winning as getting the upper hand, backing your opponent into a corner, and winning at any expense, you’ve got it all wrong. You may win in the short term, but think about the relationship going forward. Do those actions build trust, teamwork, and respect? I think not. You’ve probably created enough animosity, distrust, and jealousy to last a lifetime. In other words, you may have won the battle, but lost the war. There’s a better way…winning doesn’t have to be at someone’s expense.

Compromise: A Win-Win Strategy

Some people need to win at all costs because their ego won’t accept anything less. They’d rather win personally than accomplish something meaningful. Compromise isn’t a synonym for surrender; it’s a winning battle plan.

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Soft Skills List – 28 Skills to Working Smart
I originally published this soft skills list in June 2011.  I am honored to discover that more than 500,000 of you have since read my soft skills list and found it helpful.

There are 28 soft skills essential to your career success.  I wished I knew about many of these earlier in my career.   I want to share them so I can empower you to work smart and achieve more.  I look forward to your comments.

What are Soft Skills?

For a skill to be considered a soft skill, it needs to have three characteristics.

Rules for mastering this skill is not black and white –  Unlike hard skills, like math, where the rule for doing it perfectly is always the same, how effective you are at a soft skill changes depends on your emotional state, external circumstance, and the type of people you interact with.

This skill is portable and valuable to any job/career – Because soft skills are about your inner strength and interpersonal effectiveness, as long as you work with people, these skills are valuable to your career.

Mastering this skill is an ongoing journey – You can reach a level of competency in it but you can always encounter new situations or people that will test your soft skills and push you to learn more.

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We all probably know someone who is very intelligent, but does blatantly stupid things. Despite evidence that intelligence predicts a variety of life outcomes, the relationship between intelligence and good thinking is less clear. This research explored whether critical thinking ability or intelligence was the better predictor of real life events.

Community adults and college students (n = 244) completed a critical thinking assessment, an intelligence test, and an inventory of life events. Individuals with higher critical thinking scores and higher IQs reported fewer negative life events. Critical thinking more strongly predicted life events than intelligence and significantly added to the variance explained by IQ.

There is ample evidence that critical thinking can be taught, so there is hope that teaching critical thinking skills might prevent the occurrence of negative life events. We advocate for critical thinking instruction as a way to create a better future for everyone.

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Everyone is born with the potential for greatness. What happens next is up to you. You get to choose which path you take, how high to set the bar for yourself, and how hard you’re willing to work to clear it. You get to decide how to spend your time, who to spend it with, and what you’re willing to forgo when time runs short. Every choice that you make and every action that you take has consequences, but who better to decide what’s best for you –– than you.

It’s your life to live. Own it!

Securing the ultimate prize takes strength and courage. You’re going to face challenges that seem insurmountable and suffer setbacks along the way, but faith, hard work, and determination will see you through. Don’t listen to naysayers or allow others to lead you astray; follow your heart and let your dreams lead the way. You owe it to yourself to be the best you can be. You’ll travel this road only once. Believe in yourself and make yourself proud. There are no dress rehearsals in life.

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Does the character of our leaders matter? According to research done by KRW International it really, really, does!

Welcome to a Leadership Channel Podcast on TotalPicture. Joining Peter Clayton today is Fred Kiel, PhD, co-founder of KRW International, the author of Return On Character. For more than thirty years, he has helped Fortune 500 CEOs and senior executives build organizational effectiveness through leadership excellence and mission alignment.

Strategy+Business considers Return on Character one of the best business books of 2015.

With Credit Suisse replacing their CEO after years of fines and the future of companies like Uber and Yahoo! being questioned because of bad CEO behavior, (or the current CEO poster boy, infamous former Turing CEO Martin Shkreli), could this be the wakeup call we need to start measuring how the character of a leader impacts their organization's performance?

For the first time we now have data to measure the correlation. In Return On Character (Harvard Business Review Press,), the findings are revealed from KRW International's seven-year study on the financial impact of character.

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http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=LeaderShip

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=LeaderSkills

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Character

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Soft+Skills

Check also:

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=Emotional-Intelligence

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=Emotions-and-Learning

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=Empathy

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=EQ

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=Daniel-GOLEMAN

Learn more: http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Soft+Skills

#ModernEDU with/about #ICT: #eSkills #eLEADERship

Like other aspects of modern life, education can make the head hurt. So many outcomes, so much important work to do, so many solutions and strategies, so many variations on teaching, so many different kinds of students with so many different needs, so many unknowns in preparing for 21st Century life and the endless list of jobs that haven’t been invented.

What if we discovered one unifying factor that brought all of this confusion under one roof and gave us a coherent sense of how to stimulate the intellect, teach children to engage in collaborative problem solving and creative challenge, and foster social-emotional balance and stability—one factor that, if we got right, would change the equation for learning in the same way that confirming the existence of a fundamental particle informs a grand theory of the universe?

That factor exists: It’s called empathy.

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http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Empathy

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Soft+Skills