Teaching Soft Skills

You are about to begin teaching and the organized, engrossing classroom you have always dreamed of is just within reach. You are about to have the chance to run your classroom, and it is going to be different now that you are the one in command. You plan the fire lesson, you anticipate twenty (or thirty-nine) of your pupils ready to learn, excited to engage in your content and to do everything they can to enhance the learning of their fellow students.

Then you walk in and see some, but not all, vape-smoking, tiktok scrolling, oversharing hooligans who are doing everything they can to distract themselves away from learning anything except the most recent dance move ravaging popular culture.

I have heard mixed reviews about how students today compare to students ten, twenty, and even thirty years ago. The most common criticism I hear is they are not really any different from any of these former ‘eras’ of students, they just have different tools leading to problems.

What I do see missing, in my limited experience, is a fervent disconnect from anything academically productive, but especially in settings which require strenuous group work or any task working with people they do not know.

In helping your students build relationships with one another, building a ‘prosocial’ classroom involves putting students in the drivers seat to help teach their peers through consistent jigsaw exercises. Adam Grant defines being prosocial as “forging strong relationships with peers and trying to help peers learn,” while emphasizing the role of putting the student in a position to display competence with their new colleagues.

Teaching someone something provides a real sense of competence and even mastery that so many students are currently missing. The “prosocial” approach can help students discover an inner sense of intellectual nourishment. With my own students, the introduction activities I assign are meant to cultivate a prosocial framework for the class, or at least promote productive socialization. I have them read short articles with low-hanging fruit questions which I found has really helped break the ice and has helped my students feel more comfortable taking risks in their efforts to participate.

For teachers in modelling deeper learning, I was once listening to Jordan Peterson (cannot remember the exact podcast for citing, forgive me) on a podcast and he mentioned some of his best teaching moments come from the spontaneous integration of new information. He found that when put on the spot, modelling its connection to background knowledge and using it as an opportunity to help students visualize their biases toward new information in real time was often more productive than his initial plan. I would argue this would be because of creating a sense of mutual risk-taking in the classroom, something the jigsaw method requires students to do. This is not to say one should espouse information at random and not carefully consider the claims put forth in their rooms, but to grapple with new information as it presents itself.

Let’s say you are discussing an event during the Cold War in your class and then one of your students chime in with a random, albeit interesting, story about some atrocity committed by Mao or Stalin. This can lead the teacher in the room shying away from this not having the ability to validate the claim so they dismiss it and continue on with the planned lesson.

It is honestly more interesting when discussing the things you are learning in real time with the rest of your class. If a classroom is organized around students engaging in the same practice, this release of control over teaching not only humbles them in seeing how little they may know up to that point, but also takes the pressure off of the ‘head educator’ in the room to create a more interactive classroom overall.

Don’t be scared to relinquish control, friends.

This Week on the Pod:

Cabrina Lafonte - Cabrina is a special education teacher and is currently in her sixth year in the profession. On this episode, Cabrina and I discuss multi-sensory reading instruction, gamifying her classroom, teaching in the ‘armpit’ of her school, teaching parents how to teach, Educational Advocates, how she would design an inclusive education course, and, much more.

Next Week on the Pod:

Ben Simmons - Ben Simmons is currently playing College Basketball for the Keyano Huskies and on this episode, Ben and I discuss losing one of our parents to cancer (he lost his mother, I lost my father) in our early twenties and how dealing with their deaths have reshaped our lives.

Edutopia article: https://www.edutopia.org/article/the-overlooked-skills-that-signal-future-success-and-how-to-nurture-them/