POWER OF NON-COGNITIVE ABILITIES
Teachers are usually committed professionals whose
challenge is to plan learning process so that it makes the biggest possible
difference to students’ learning and progress. There are numerous issues that
have to be taken into consideration, like structure of the course, goals to
achieve, scientific content, assessment or the planned workload. However,
success in the world of employment is strongly connected with so called soft
skills, by which we understand social and emotional abilities.
Unfortunately, they are often forgotten in syllabuses and curriculums. In fact,
the sooner they are presented and trained, the more profitable it will be for our
students. Soft skills will help to open mind, become ready to adapt to new
environments and overcome obstacles.
One of the first people dealing with soft skills was
Dale Carnegie in 1930’s in his book How to win friends and influence people?
(Carnegie,1936). It was a self-help book which became a bestseller with over 30
million copies sold all over the world. In spite of the fact that the rules
mentioned by Carnegie have been known and applied by human resource managers for
years, very few formal courses embrace them in education programmes.
It is not enough to design class activities so that
some interpersonal training would be there. Soft skills should also be included
in any curriculum. Syllabus is one of the first means of written contact
between educators and students. It is especially important in on-line courses
where a syllabus is a part of introduction and it informs what is required in a
course. Placing interpersonal abilities among objectives to be achieved can
become a motivating factor to obtain skills so important in students’ future life
and career aspirations. There numerous non-cognitive skills that should be
involved in teaching programmes.
The first one is active listening. Giving
attention to what other people say, not asking questions at inappropriate
times, taking time to understand the points being made are needed in the world
visually polluted by screens surrounding us everywhere. Research shows that students
using laptops have a worse understanding than those taking hand-written notes. (The
Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note
Taking, Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer)
Critical thinking can be
defined as evaluating the validity and relevance of information. It improves
other important abilities like problem solving and decision making. There is a
range of strategies for promoting critical thinking, including case study,
cooperative learning, written assessments and others. Each should be designed
to force students to think about the particular situation and later present a critical
report.
According to the World Health Organization, depression
is the main cause of health problems. It is linked to stress and researchers
claim that personal resilience is crucial to diminish the suffering from
conditions like anxiety and depression (The psychobiology of depression and
resilience to stress, Steven M Southwick, M Vythilingham, D Charney).
Emphasizing the importance of mistakes in achieving success and dividing big tasks
into manageable steps can be helpful. High resilience not only helps in social
and emotional contacts but it also improves academic performance.
I have mentioned only three important skills which
should appear in plan of any course. There are many others: self-monitoring and
self-improvement, ability of cooperation, leadership skills or ethics. All of
them are useless without practice, and they cannot be
developed unless we learn to collaborate with each other every single day. That
is why it should be highly recommended to include them in any syllabus or
curriculum.
I couldn't agree more! The problem with these skills is that they are hard to assess and examine in the ways demanded by our increasingly results-oriented education systems. Life skills etc are seen as "messy" and diffuse and take time to develop unlike hard facts and figures that can be crammed and memorised. Politicians and authorities everywhere create league tables showing the "best" and "worst" schools and colleges and the way to climb on these rankings is to get better test scores. As long as we are stuck in this results-oriented thinking it's hard to work with life skills, problem-solving, critical thinking etc. I wonder how we can move the focus to learning how to learn and learning for life.
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