Stop Calling Them Soft Skills!

A nationwide survey showed that the top reason people are fired from their jobs is that they lack soft skills: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, adaptability, and confidence. People lack these skills not because they are incapable of learning them, but because they never had a reason to. So much of the education system is focused on technical knowledge and “hard skills,” and very little on these essential skills. Essentially, there was not enough purpose to do the hard work of developing soft skills.

Trevor talks about how teachers can design learning experiences that require their students to develop essential skills. While still learning ‘hard skills’ and academic content, students can do purposeful work that makes them better communicators, collaborators, problem solvers, and citizens.