Incorporating soft skills into the curriculum
- 1. Incorporating Soft Skills into Your Classroom Susan Collins & Maria Capella-Miller
- 2. Introductions Ice Breaker Maria• We are going to do a circle for the introductions, using the Name Game (Handout) • State: • Your name • The subject that you teach • One of your hobbies • The next person introduces her/himself. Once she/he does it, she will add: LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO…
- 4. INTRODUCTIONS’ WRAP UP • Teaching to Network • The names – The most beautiful sound. • Ice breaker. • Repetition: Good for learning. • Soft skills • A hot topic. • Skills that can’t be measured. • Some of them are already on our syllabus. • Tolerance Acceptance – Inclusion • Relating well with classmates, later with coworkers. • Teamwork
- 5. Content • Maria: • Tolerance, A teachable subject • Studies of the 21st Century • Susan: • Playing Well with Others (collegiality) • Emotional Intelligence as a teachable subject • Curiosity, Perseverance, Meaning (virtue) • Discussion: • Infusing your curriculum
- 6. Stereotypes Are Deadly • Race, Color, National Origin • Age, Gender, Pregnancy Status • Marital Status • Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity • Religion • Disability Status
- 7. Tolerance, a Teachable Subject Hard skills: Learning how many bones are in the body Memorizing and applying the Pythagorean theorem Anything that is measurable and easily quantified At work: Operating a machine or typing 70 words per minute. Soft skills: Getting along with others in the classroom; working well in groups - team-work; Positive Communication; Dependability (In your syllabus the skills of attendance, punctuality, meeting deadlines, staying on task); More soft skills: Ethics (personal integrity/no cheating); Positive attitude (willingness to learn, good personal appearance);
- 8. Tolerance • Freedom from bigotry • It is an attitude toward religion, race, nationality, age, gender • In medicine: The capacity to absorb a drug continuously, or in large doses without adverse effects • Synonyms: • Patience • Impartiality
- 9. Sharing a Personal Experience • Growing being bias? • A vocational rehabilitation counselor I was trained to be competent. I was caring and dedicated. Clients were assigned to us. • A few times a client would make a request to my supervisor: Can I have another counselor, one without an accent ? (an attitude toward accents) • Jokes about someone’s nationality? • Colombia, famous for good and bad things. Bad things: High volume of drug production and trafficking. My coworker Larry upon seeing me walking with a client to my office, asked him: “Are you wearing your bullet proof? She is from Colombia.” (an attitude toward place of origen.)
- 12. Why to Practice Tolerance • The Golden Rule. We begin by understanding what other person is experiencing from within the person’s frame reference. We place ourselves in the other person’s shoes. • A thing that we can’t change about people that are different than us: They live in the same world where we live. • Things we can change : • Making our minds about a person before we get to know him/her (my Chinesse and Japanesse students) • We begin practicing the habit of being tolerant until we experience “No side effects.” • Pixar “The Birds.”
- 13. Developing Skills for Youth in the 21st Century Ewan Wright and Moosung Lee • The number of immigrants worldwide increased by 50 percent to 232 million between 1990 and 2013 (UNDESA 2014) • The total number of internet users increased sevenfold to 2.4 billion between 2000 and 2012 (Internet World Stats 2013) • “The ability to think and work with others coming from different racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds is a critical skill in the 21st century society (Howard Cardner p.254)
- 14. Developing Skills for Youth in the 21st Century Ewan Wright and Moosung Lee • 21st century skills can be learned and developed through appropriate pedagogical approaches. • Educational practitioners (teachers) should build into their syllabus and lesson plans activities that engage students into acquiring and maintaining these skills. • Highly trained and skilled teachers use a combination of: • Engaging with content • Classroom management • On-going monitoring of student progress
- 15. International Baccalaurate Diplomas• Educate the whole person. • Prepare students to be successful in a global society. • Use a combination of hard skills and soft skills. • To get the Diploma, three core requirements: • First Requirement: • Creativity • Action CAS • Service
- 16. First Requirement (CAS) • Creativity: Service Projects (to promote interpersonal non-cognitive skills) – Can you think in the field that you teach of a service project to incorporate? • Action: Participating in Sports, Expeditions, Local and International Projects. • Service: Community and Service Activities (helping children with special needs, visiting hospitals, working with homeless people (to promote understanding of other people’s culture, situations, needs, and to practice the habit of tolerance.)
- 17. International Baccalaurate Diplomas• Second Requirement: • Extended Essay (EE): a 4,000 word essay of a topic of their choice. EE encourages the combination of intellectual discovery and creativity involved in the process of researching and writing. • Third Requirement: • Theory of Knowledge (TOK): Students’ demonstrated knowledge of other cultures in the world compared with their own culture. Students should be able to recognize their own personal biases. Critical thinking is met through TOK.
- 18. If… • You noticed that students are: • avoiding another student who is not included in conversations and/or study groups, you already know the signs. • mimicking another student that shows some mannerisms. You are facing the whole class, you are bound to see it. • From the window of my classroom. • Students laugh when another student talks. • Students don’t interact with each other in your classroom.
- 19. Why to Teach Tolerance? • Once at work, employees have to abide by federal laws that protect people against stereotypes (Race, Color, National Origen, Age, Gender, Marital Status, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Religion, and Disability status.) Teach about it now. • Companies are required to maintain work environments that are free from Harassment and Retaliation. Harassment behavior has consequences (intimidating, making offensive jokes, graphic materials, using profanity, etc. Teach about it now.
- 20. Why to Teach Tolerance? For a peaceful world Every week we hear about new crimes Hating other people has to stop
- 22. Why Us? • Teaching a subject versus teaching for life • Preparing young minds for the real world • Helping students to be successful • Emotional intelligence should be learned in elementary school, not at work. Employers don’t have time to teach it…things that were not taught during elementary or high school can still be learned at the college… • Instructors can’t wait. • Job Retention. • Work growth.
- 23. Thank you!
- 25. Look at that!
- 26. Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant
- 27. ● Givers ● Matchers ● Takers Which are you? MATCHER
- 28. ● hundreds of salespeople completed a questionnaire on commitment to helping coworkers/customers ● tracked sales revenue over the course of a year ● most productive salespeople were the “givers”—those who reported the strongest concern for benefiting others from the very beginning of their jobs
- 29. The biggest difference between the givers who rise to the top and those who sink to the bottom is the boundaries that they set. Those who maintain success are careful to balance concern for others with their own interests. Instead of helping all of the people all of the time, they help many of the people much of the time. They’re careful to give in ways that are high benefit to others but not exceedingly costly to themselves. -- Adam Grant
- 30. Being a giver ... ● inspires us to hope for the best ● invites us to embrace our own wealth ● is contagious ● can become communal/institutional
- 31. Todd Kashdan, PhD Professor of Clinical Psychology George Mason University Kashdan, Todd Barrett, and Mantak Yuen. "Whether Highly Curious Students Thrive Academically Depends on Perceptions about the School Learning Environment: A Study of Hong Kong Adolescents." Motivation and Emotion 31.4 (2007): 260-70. ProQuest. Web. 26 July 2015. Log into EFSC library to access online
- 32. Study of 484 Hong Kong high school students ● Students with greater trait curiosity in who perceived their schools to be challenging had the greatest academic success Curiosity Positive Feelings Academic about School Achievement
- 33. Study of 484 Hong Kong high school students ● Students with greater trait curiosity who perceived their schools to be less challenging had the least academic success Curiosity Negative Feelings Academic about School Achievement
- 34. Study of 484 Hong Kong high school students ● Findings were not attributable to subjective happiness or self-esteem
- 35. Study of 484 Hong Kong high school students ● Results ○ the benefits of curiosity are activated by student beliefs that the school environment supports their values about growth and learning ○ these benefits can be disabled by perceived person-environment mismatches
- 36. How we feel about ourselves, one another, and our community really matters. It affects academic outcome.
- 39. OECD “Beyond reading, writing, and computing, what competencies are needed by individuals to live a successful life and for society to face the challenges of the present and the future in modern, democratic societies?” OECD project DeSeCo (Definition and Selection of Competencies: Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations, OECD, 2005): Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development
- 41. Learn more about this: http://www.transpacificproject.com/index.php/paradigm-shift/ Hobo-Dyer Equal Area Projection Map
- 43. James Heckman Nobel Laureate in Economics Professor of Economics The University of Chicago I am interested in the economics of human flourishing, or the circumstances under which people are able to develop the skills to thrive in our current economy. These encompass the conventional, cognitive sense of the word (education, on-the-job training) as well as the noncognitive sense (such as the qualities of perseverance and accountability).
- 45. ● Curiosity ● Grit ● Meaning (virtue) Non- Cognitive Skills
- 46. The growth mindset was discovered by Stanford professor and Mindset Works co-founder Carol Dweck, Ph.D., and is described in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.Eduardo Briceño is the Co- Founder and CEO of Mindset Works, an organization that helps schools and other organizations cultivate a growth mindset culture. https://youtu.be/pN34FNbOKXc
- 48. ● Curiosity ● Grit ● Meaning (virtue) Non- Cognitive Skills
- 49. If we had access to the interior of our brains when we are consumed by joyous explorations, what we would see is an abundance of dopamine and opiate activity. Dopamine is central to curiosity and exploratory behavior. If you eliminate it, you become apathetic, lazy lump. If you increase it, you become fully engaged in the world, searching for and discovering new things. The greatest advantage of curiosity is that by spending time and energy with the new, increased neurological connections are made possible. Facts and experiences are synthesized into a web, paving the way for greater intelligence and wisdom. Curious? by Todd Kashdan, PhD
- 50. Angela Duckworth The Duckworth Lab University of Pennsylvania http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit?language=en
- 51. Character is a skill, not a trait.
- 53. ● Curiosity ● Grit ● Meaning (virtue) Non- Cognitive Skills
- 54. 1. Varying Conditions of Practice 1. Spacing Study and Practice Sessions 1. Interleaving (rather than Blocking) 1. Generation Effects/Using Assessments Make Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning Make Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning Elizabeth L. Bjork and Robert Bjork
- 55. Instruction ● consistent ● predictable ● constrained environment Retrieval ● dependent on context ● relatively immediate ● within same context Simple: ● Studying same material in two different rooms increases recall ● Beanbag toss Varying Conditions
- 56. Massing Practice ● short-term retrieval Distributed Practice ● long-term retrieval Simple: ● Spacing study/instructions sessions promotes long-term learning Spacing Study or Practice
- 57. Blocking ● teach one topic at a time ● learning is quicker, but short-term Interleaving ● teach separate topics intermittently ● practice separate tasks intermittently ● learning is slower ● superior long-term retention and transfer of skills Desirable Difficulty: Repeated reloading fosters learning and strengthens future reloading and retrieval Interleaving (vs. blocking)
- 58. Instruction ● being present with answers, solutions, and procedures Generation ● having to generate an answer, solution or procedure Test ● a retrieval attempt ● vehicle for learning rather than assessment ● retrieval = power memory modifier ● can activate students’ learning Generation Effects
- 59. How can we infuse soft skills training into any discipline specific curriculum? Here are some suggestions for combining curiosity, interleaving, generation effects, and varying conditions.
- 60. This lesson will explain the process of data transfer throughout computer systems and the form the data gets transferred into. Additionally, we will touch on some factors that alter the transfer speed. We will use simple analogies and examples to explain complicated concepts. We will present a situation where a mailman has five packages to deliver and he is constrained by time to deliver them. We will also include an analogy that includes running with a folder through the hallways of a school to deliver it to a certain office by using a relay system with different students taking turns at the task. Those two examples and their solutions will help the students understand the basics of data transfer and the factors affecting the speed at which that happens. Students will learn to calculate the time it takes to transfer folders and files after knowing their respective sizes. MIT Blossoms
- 61. ● Assign students to make explanatory videos based on course competencies by showing them these example videos from MIT.
- 62. ● Engage and enhance your students' creativity, collaboration, altruism with demonstrations of mastery by having them contribute to School in the Cloud.
- 63. Assessments Are you a giver, a taker, or a matcher? Find out: http://www.giveandtake.com/#!evaluateyourself/c10x3
- 64. Assessments Implicit Association Test https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html • Race • Skin Tone • Arab-Muslim • Weight • Disability • Gender • Age • Sexuality The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., black people, gay people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy)
- 65. Assessments Get your GRIT Score: https://sasupenn.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9H6iT93yv4rozeB Academic Diligence Test: https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/duckworth/pages/academic-diligence-task Angela Duckworth The Duckworth Lab University of Pennsylvania
- 66. Use the CTECenter for Teaching Excellence: http://www.easternflorida.edu/faculty-staff/cte/resources/curriculum-development.cfm Diversity Checklist: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11g4RtZSUNs44qu6zbjJahZmHm7XFCAyR98- YImO9kuE/edit?usp=sharing Active Learning in the Classroom: Donald Paulson and Jennifer Faust http://www.easternflorida.edu/faculty-staff/cte/documents/active-learning-for-college- classroom.pdf CTE video: Biology Instructor - Holly McKnight https://youtu.be/ywnZUPMhcLk
- 68. Encourage Active Investigation ● Course Plan Repository www.easternflorida.edu/admissions/registrars-office/ e-course-plan-repository.cfm ● Interviewing local experts ● Emailing experts in the field ● On-site observations
- 69. Thank you!