6 Soft Skills Students Need and How to Teach Them | Wow College Essay

I bring you 6 soft skills that can be taught, measured, and developed through play and other practices. You can also read a large number of essays on WowEssays Premium Base.

Emotional skills are essential for success in school, work, and life. However, teaching and formally assessing them is often not so simple and can be challenging. I selected 6 soft skills that students need and how to teach them in school.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills, 21st-century skills, soft skills, or social and emotional learning skills. Whatever one chooses to call them, they are defined as qualities that, independent of acquired knowledge, are desirable for specific jobs, such as having a flexible and positive attitude, common sense, and people management.

In other words, they are a combination of social and communication skills, personality traits, attitudes, social and emotional intelligence, which enable people to navigate their environment, work with others and perform well.

Generally, children learn these skills naturally by interacting with other people. And contrary to popular belief, if a person does not possess any of these soft skills or has not been able to acquire them, they can be trained to develop them.

In addition, soft skills make a difference in the workplace since it is these competencies, habits, and behaviors that distinguish two people who, for example, have studied the same thing and obtained the same academic results. Still, when it comes to undertaking a project, resolving a conflict, or relating to others, they are more successful.

The future of soft skills

According to a McKinsey & Co. consulting firm report, as a result of the automation that will occur in jobs over the next decade, the global workforce will undergo a dramatic change. From this same study, the need for basic cognitive skills will decrease by 15%, while skills that computers cannot easily replace will be in high demand. These skills are social and emotional skills such as leadership, empathy, creativity, or conflict resolution. Therefore, these are the skills we should be teaching in schools if we want to prepare students for future jobs.

But there are often difficulties in teaching and assessing these fundamental skills in schools because they are not covered in the academic curriculum. Games are an appropriate platform for students to learn the basic skills for functioning in society. Many of the attributes they will need to excel in school or the workforce (teamwork, problem-solving, etc.) correlate to gaming and beyond.

Here are six soft skills that students need and what tools can be used to develop them.

1. Leadership

Leadership is one of those beneficial lifelong learning skills that can change people’s lives. It must be clear that a leader is the one who manages things, but what a leader does is inspire, motivate and empower. True leaders see the best in people and teach them to take advantage of their potential in everything they do. You have to get students to move from the “I can do it” attitude to “we can do it” because it makes everyone better.

How to do it:

Dynamics such as role-playing or the “blind leader” help students deal with possible situations in life. In the first case, it is a matter of distributing different roles among the participants (such as the pessimist, the expert, the proactive) and letting them interact by representing each character. After the role-play, it is vital to analyze the mistakes and successes made during the role play and repeat the simulation applying these suggestions.

In the second case, they are divided into two groups: one is blindfolded, and the other is not. The latter will be the leaders who will guide the blind through different exercises (such as filling glasses of water, for example). The game is used to analyze leadership styles, giving and receiving orders, and the resistance or acceptance of command.

2. Teamwork

Why is it so challenging to develop teamwork? Considering that it is a circumstance that we will have to go through at school, university, and most of our working life.

Teamwork” refers to negotiation, task sharing, and conflict resolution. At the same time, it leads to the satisfaction of sharing goals and developing a feeling of belonging to a group. In today’s society that encourages competitiveness and individualism, teamwork represents a significant challenge that needs to be learned in the classroom.

3.Communication

Another of the soft skills that students need to develop in school is communication. Having communication skills means better relationships, greater empathy towards each other, and, at the same time, more productivity in tasks.

How to do it:

• Active listening, listening to the student attentively and asking questions as needed to understand the other person’s message and emotions.
• Choosing the best time and place to communicate is essential. It is best to look for a suitable location that is quiet and that, for example, after a discussion, feelings are not running high.
• Use open questions to show our students that we are interested in what they are telling us.
• Encourage empathy, i.e., the ability to understand, be aware of, be sensitive to, and vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, and experiences.

4. Problem solving

When it comes to students’ soft skills for lifelong learning, this is one of the most important. Solving real-world problems is crucial to surviving and thriving in the present and future.

The world is constantly changing and will continue to change. Due to this fact, students will be solving future problems that we cannot even imagine yet. They will face challenges that require skills to define a problem, design an appropriate solution, and implement it.

How to implement it:

• By fostering creativity and producing and developing original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts.
• Also, developing critical thinking is conceptualizing, analyzing, and synthesizing information objectively to reach a conclusion or form a judgment.
• One idea could be to keep a “Diary of Emotions” to help them work through the conflicts they face in their daily lives. A notebook where students can identify and write down the everyday disputes they have to deal with and, by placing them, give them the tools to solve them.

5. Time management

There are only 24 hours in each day and what you do with that time makes a difference. That is why it is vital from school age to teach how to manage study time with leisure time. Although students overlook the importance of time management in primary and secondary school, it is vital in the first years of university when the study load increases. At the same time, they want to have more free time and socializing.

How to do it:

A straightforward way to start organizing your time is to use a daily planner. It can be either the classic paper planner or an online version, or both. This way, they will learn to manage time wisely and get the most out of each day.

So is goal setting. The first part of the process is to identify what you want to achieve, then methodically plan the steps you can take, taking into account the times to achieve this goal.

6. Organizational Skills

In addition to knowing how to manage time, staying organized saves valuable time to do everything that needs to be done. As the phrase “A place for everything and everything in its place” goes, it is good to convey that all study materials (calculator, schedule, books, notebooks, laptop, etc.) should be kept in a convenient place.